Tag: Mormon literary history

Announcing The AMV Guide to Mormon Literature

Wm is going to be blogging (and then compiling) a guide to Mormon literature. Give him feedback on the structure of the project.

It seems to me that Mormon literature as a field is difficult to approach. Unless you are one of the few who have the chance to take the Mo-lit class at BYU, there’s no real easy way to get an overview of the field. This makes it difficult to enter into the conversations that happen here and at Dawning of a Brighter Day and elsewhere. Some of these conversations have been going on for a long time, and it’s hard to know how and where and when to jump in. I aim to change that in a low-key, non-scholarly way.

Here’s the plan:

I am going to write The AMV Guide to Mormon Literature. I’m going to do so by writing short entries on a variety of topics in Scrivener, which is a fantastic tool for dealing with lots of information and allows one to easily output writing in a variety of forms. I will post each entry as it is complete to AMV and ask for feedback. I’ll then do a brief edit of the entry based on the feedback and move on to the next topic. When I hit the point where I’ve covered everything that needs to be covered (with the caveat, of course, that there could always be more), I will then compile the whole set of entries in Scrivener, add a simple cover, and publish the complete guide as an ebook which I will then offer for sale through the standard channels. Profits from the sale of the book will go to pay for web hosting for AMV, Wilderness Interface Zone and LDS Cinema Online.

While this guide will be my (personal) voice, my (radical-middle) concerns, and my (idiosyncratic) perspective, I will also welcome feedback on each entry that I post. Anyone who provides it will be added to a list of co-conspirators that will be published at the back of the book. Continue reading “Announcing The AMV Guide to Mormon Literature”

Slowly Flowering: My grad school paper on Mormon literature

I have decided to post a Mormon literature-related paper I wrote for a graduate school class titled “Memory, Nation and Diaspora.”. The class was actually my final comp lit seminar at SF State and was taught by Martha Klironomos, the Nikos Kazantzakis Chair and director of Modern Greek Studies. She was very supportive of my desire to write about Mormon literature. I think she even gave me an A on the paper. Most of the non-Mormon-related criticism cited in the paper is pulled from some of the works we read for the course so the theoretical framework might not be to everyone’s taste, but I found it interesting. In fact, it’s the university course that has influenced my thinking about Mormon literature the most.

Anyway, here it is. No modifications have been made to the original text except for correcting one spelling error that I caught in a very quick re-reading:

Slowly Flowering: Mormon Literary Criticism on Mormon Literary History and Future

And here is an excerpt:

“But more fundamentally, through its recovering and criticism of Mormon literary history, Mormon literary theory invokes a set of texts and way of viewing them that helps preserve a Mormon ethnies, an ethnies which includes individuals beyond active members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. And more importantly, by exposing the deficiencies of the current Mormon literary canon, Mormon literary theory sustains the dream of a great literature produced by a chosen people, a dream that combines memory and desire, a prophecy that drives the very literary production that ensures the survival of the ethnies.”

It was also an interesting exercise in trying to figure out how to give decent context for Mormonism without getting long-winded about it. Upon re-reading, I cringed a bit at some of my notes, but on the whole I think the paper stands up fairly well. Or at least I’m not so embarrassed by it that I wasn’t willing to post it. My thanks to AMV commenter Laura Craner who reminded me of this paper in Anneke’s Twilight post.