Literature
Literature: Faith, Imagination, and Justice
This track involves consideration of the spiritual dimensions of literature from fairy tales to recent American narratives. Special concerns include faith, writing, and commitment; art and empathy; the dynamism between literature and life; the sacramental imagination; and visions of justice, community and the dispossessed.
The program will engage students with questions related to community and social justice through reading, personal writing exercises, discussion, and volunteer service. Students should also expect to view and discuss several topic-related films, hear from selected guest speakers, and participate extensively in community service projects with local groups working with the aged and the infirm.
Readings for the program will be selected from among the following:
G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (selections)
George Orwell, “Why I Write” and “Politics and the English Language”
Leo Tolstoy, “What Is Art?”
Selected fairy tales
Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (selections)
Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life
Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (selections)
Emily Dickinson, selected poems
Abraham Lincoln, selected speeches
Isak Dinesen, Babette’s Feast (text and film)
Ingmar Bergman, The Seventh Seal (film)
Simone Weil, Waiting for God
Cynthia Ozick, The Shawl
Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness
Flannery O’Connor, selected stories
John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
Karen Hesse, Out of the Dust
“Surviving the Dust Bowl” (film)
Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea
Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol
Norman MacLean, A River Runs Through It (text and film)
John Gardner, On Moral Fiction
Robert Coles, The Call of Stories (selections)
Don McNeill, Compassion
Jonathan Kozol, Rachel and Her Children
Wendell Berry, In the Presence of Fear & The Way of Ignorance
Barbara Kingsolver, Small Wonder
Michael Lerner, The Left Hand of God
Mark Edmundson, On the Uses of a Liberal Education
Peter Singer, The Singer Solution to World Poverty
Academic Directors
A highly-acclaimed member of the Notre Dame faculty since 1967, Dr. Thomas Werge studies the relationships between literature and religious thought in the history of ideas, in Dante, and in the Calvinist and Puritan imaginations as they shape early and 19th-century American literature. He is also interested in the opposition and tension between gnostic and sacramental visions of experience and their expression in literary forms and ideas. He has written about Thomas Shepard, essays on Dante, Melville and Twain, and Simone Weil, introductions to the writings of several Puritan writers, including William Bradford, Thomas Hooker, and Shepard. He is coeditor of the scholarly journal Religion and Literature. He has received the Charles E. Sheedy Award for Excellence in Teaching.
Dr. Werge was for many years the secretary of the National Conference on Christianity and Literature, an organization of scholars who address the religious dimension of literature. He has also served on the executive committee of the Literature and Religion division of the Modern Language Association.
Ed Kelly has devoted all of his professional life to the development of young people. A graduate of Notre Dame with a B.A. and M.A. in English, Kelly has been teaching for 43 years. He retired from high school teaching in May 2000, after 31 years at Niles High School, where he chaired the English Department and fashioned innovative courses in film, Shakespeare in performance, and service learning. He currently teaches in the Freshman Writing Program at Notre Dame.
University of Notre Dame