AiD, Ep. 2; Fr. Mapple, the sermonic urge, and so-called postmodernism

Adventures in Dissertating, Episode 2:

Yesterday and today's writing took me from the Augustine-Kenneth Burke section of my introduction, through a brief introduction to sermons in American fiction and postmodern theory. This week, I am fleshing out the cannonical American fiction sermon section, spending time with Moby Dick, The Sound and the Fury, Huck Finn, and The Scarlet Letter. Please, webpals: feel free to jump in to suggest important novels with sermons that you think I may be missing (prior to 1950, at this point)!

I am working steadily on the right language to describe the boundary-moments I am most interested in: how Augustine drags rhetoric into the Christian sphere; how Christianity transitions from illegal minority sect to the empire's religion . . . and compare them to . . .  how traditional fictional sermons in American novels changed after the (arbitrarily drawn, at this point) 1950 boundary of postmodern thought, and why studying these changes are worth any academic energy at all. They, of course, are important; it's just the justification part that is tricky so far. Maybe mostly because I have not written the example chapters yet to arrive at my conclusion.

The last day of writing has been spirited but different. Yesterday day was thorough, included lots of citation and opening books. Last night/this morning has been machine-gun typing with lots of mental notes, like: I'll look that up later, I know where it is. I think I started to see, for a short time, where I was going more clearly, so I had to get there before the end of the weekend.