Queer Fish : Christian Unreason from Darwin to Derrida

Schad, John

ISBN 10: 184519019X / ISBN 13: 9781845190194

Published by Liverpool University Press, 2004

About this Item

Former library copy. Pages intact with possible writing/highlighting. Binding strong with minor wear. Dust jackets/supplements may not be included. Includes library markings. Stock photo provided. Product includes identifying sticker. Better World Books: Buy Books. Do Good.

Seller Inventory # 67487890-75

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Queer Fish : Christian Unreason from Darwin to Derrida
• Publisher: Liverpool University Press
• Publication Date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 184519019X
• ISBN 13: 9781845190194
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: Very Good
• Weight: 1.027 pounds

About this title

Synopsis

At some point in the nineteenth century, God died, the world grew secular, and Christianity became oppositional, irrational, odd, even queer -- or so the story goes. To explore this narrative, John Schad offers a suitably odd or 'unreasonable' history of what Michel Foucault once called 'Christian unreason'. This proves, in part, to be an unlikely, or uncanny history of Christian involvement in such radical movements and developments as Anarchism, Surrealism, the Absurd, deconstruction, and even quantum physics. It also proves to be a dark and guilty history of Christian involvement in such terrible things and events as slavery, forced conversion, Fenian bombs, the Great War, the Holocaust, and even Hiroshima. The book begins with Matthew Arnold's 'Dover Beach' and its withdrawing 'sea of faith' as time and again Schad finds the figure of the Christian to be beached, a fish out of water -- a queer fish, in fact. This, then, is a book that is all at sea -- beginning with Charles Darwin's voyage to the 'extreme point of Christendom' that was South America, and ending with James Joyce and Jacques Derrida in 'the same boat', the same ruined, but sea-going, boat that is the twentieth-century Western Church. In between: Karl Marx is to be found in 1848 watching 'the waves of revolution' withdraw in Berlin; Sigmund Freud stands incredulous by the shore of Loch Ness; Oscar Wilde is laughed at in the rain at Clapham Junction; and Charles Dickens visits a church for the drowned, a church for ship-wrecked corpses. Revisiting 'Dover Beach' is often an appalling event, an event of death; often it is comic or even absurd. Sometimes it is both at once. With chapters devoted to Darwin, Marx, Freud, Dickens, Wilde, Joyce, and Derrida, Queer Fish has plenty for students not only of literature and philosophy but also theology and Jewish studies.

About the Author

John Schad is Professor of Modern Literature at Loughborough University. He is author of Queer Fish: Christian Unreason from Darwin to Derrida, Victorians In Theory and The Reader in the Dickensian Mirrors; editor of Writing the Bodies of Christ, Thomas Hardy’s A Laodicean and Dickens Refigured; and co-editor of life.after.theory. Professor Schad is currently writing an experimental book called Derrida via Oxford: Barely a Life.