Introduction to My Literary Criticism
© Copyright 1999 Skylar Hamilton Burris

On this site you will find a collection of papers I have written on literary works; some were written in graduate school and some in undergraduate school.  Those written in my earlier years will perhaps be obvious because of their lack of quality, but I post them anyway in order to share my insights, however slimly developed. Someday, I hope to engage in further research in order to revise and expand these earlier works.

As a Christian, I cannot help but be informed by my beliefs when I read literature. To be so informed is considered by many academics as equivalent to being ignorant.   Although it is academically acceptable to approach any work with a feminist, Marxist, Freudian, minority, gay and lesbian, or other such prejudice, if a critic dares to approach the same work with a Christian prejudice, her criticism is no longer considered "scholarship." 

I have found a safe harbor in writing on the works of authors who employ Christian themes--such as Milton, Hopkins, Hawthorne, Melville, and Rossetti.  In these works, it is nearly impossible to ignore the Christian content, and so bringing Christianity into the analysis is considered acceptable.  (Indeed, academics who study and teach these authors are less likely to be prejudiced against Christianity.)  But a Christian analysis can also be brought to bare upon purely secular works.  

If there is one consistent theme to be found in the great works of the 20th century, it seems to me to be the presentation of a doomed quest: the search to find something capable of filling that great void that has been left in the soul of man by the repudiation of God.  I say doomed, of course, because it is too large a space to be filled by anything but the infinite Creator.  It is not surprising, therefore, to find that 20th century works are almost inevitably depressing.  If these novels and poems teach me anything as a Christian, they teach me to feel grateful that I have managed, by acknowledging a power greater than myself, to escape the empty egoism and hopeless restlessness exhibited by both these authors and the characters they create.

This is not to say that I discount other avenues of criticism.  I merely mean to assert my right to approach literature with my belief system, just as does the feminist, the Freudian, the lesbian, and the Marxist.  I of course will always continue to read and assimilate various critical approaches to literary works.  But in so doing, I do not ever cease to be influenced by my beliefs. My Christianity is not something that can be placed in a box and put up on shelf when it conveniences me.  It permeates my very being; it changes everything I see.  It is no more or less a prejudice than the prejudice of the secular humanist, the Darwinian, or the multiculturalist.  It is no more ignorant and no more uneducated. In fact, it is in some ways more informed; because whereas I am aware of and read a variety of other views, most modern literary academics remain ignorant of the Christian viewpoint. 

Christians can learn from secular artist, authors, and critics. But we must be aware of a fact which T.S. Eliot describes in his "Religion and Literature":

We must remember that the greater part of our current reading matter is written for us by people who have no real belief in a supernatural order . . . And the greater part . . . is coming to be written by people who not only have no such belief, but are even ignorant of the fact that there are still people in the world so "backward" or so "eccentric" as to continue to believe. So long as we are conscious of the gulf fixed between ourselves and the greater part of contemporary literature, we are more or less protected from being harmed by it, and are in a position to extract from it what good it has to offer us.

I hope you enjoy these papers, whether they take a Christian mimetic, historical, thematic, psychological, or linguistic approach. Feel free to offer me your comments on any of them at SSBurris@cox.net.