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Garry Watson, Opening Doors:
Thought From (and of) the Outside
Opening Doors hopes to
reach readers who are either hostile to, or indifferent to,
religion—with the aim, not of converting them, but of
encouraging them to rethink the subject. Believers should
also find much to interest them.
Opening Doors
begins with a polemical introduction in which Watson
explains where he agrees with—also, more importantly, where
he differs from—the currently popular New Atheism (Dawkins,
Hitchens etc.).
Opening Doors
may be the most provocative intervention yet made in the
context of the recent philosophical turn to religion.
Reviving the case made by the now largely forgotten literary
critic, F.R.Leavis, for the novelists D.H.Lawrence and
Joseph Conrad, Watson brings these writers into a
conversation about religion with Derrida, Levinas and
Agamben, arguing that when read together these most unlikely
bedfellows help us revitalize our thinking.
“A deeply serious book—a rehabilitation of F.R. Leavis as an
ethical thinker, a rereading of novelists important to
Leavis, principally George Eliot, Joseph Conrad, and D.H.
Lawrence—that deserves the attention of critics in the
Anglo-American tradition.”
— J. M. Coetzee, author of (among others)
Waiting for the Barbarians,
Age of Iron,
Disgrace
Contents
Preface: A different kind of meditation
Part One: Introductory
Chapter One
A polemical clearing of the ground
Chapter Two
Why We Need to Rethink Religion
Part Two: The Outside
Chapter
Three
Shifting Focus from the “Outsider” to the “Outside”
Chapter
Four Thought from (and of) the outside:
Lawrence, Levinas and Derrida on the Firing Line
Chapter
Five
Thought from (and of) the outside: Abraham, Conrad’s “Secret
Sharer” and Hospitality
Chapter
Six
Balancing as we go: slave or noble? Abrahamic or Hellenic?
Chapter
Seven
Conclusion: “Driv[ing] on to the edge
of the
unknown, and beyond”
Notes
Name index
Subject index
The Author
Garry Watson (PhD University of
Sussex) teaches film and early 20th century English and
American literature in the department of English and Film
Studies at the University of Alberta. He has published
essays in such journals as
English and
Cambridge
Quarterly (in the UK),
The Compass, University of
Toronto Quarterly,
Cineaction,
English Studies
in Canada (Canada), and
Études Lawrenciennes
(in France) and
College English (in the US). He is the author of
The
Cinema of Mike Leigh: A Sense of the Real (2004),
The
Leavises, The “Social,” and the Left (1977), and
co-editor (with M. Elizabeth Sargent) of
Approaches to
Teaching D.H.Lawrence
(MLA.
2001).
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