Stories of the Middle Space: Reading the Ethics of Postmodern Realisms (review)

• Published in: English studies in Canada 2010, Vol.36 (4), p.140-142
• Main Author: Walker, Madeline
• Format: Review
• Language: English
• Subjects: Bowen, Deborah C; Ethics; Postmodernism; Short stories
• ISSN: 0317-0802; 1913-4835; 1913-4835
• DOI: 10.1353/esc.2010.0053

Bowen's declaration of identity as a Christian scholar is unsurprising-the book cover tells us that Bowen looks at postmodern fictions from a "faith-based perspective" and gives Christian readings of various British and Canadian texts. [...]Bowen teaches at Redeemer University College, a Christian undergraduate institution in Ancaster, Ontario. In her prologue, subtitled a "Christian Apologia," Bowen writes that her first premise in writing the book is that "there is a Creator God" (7), and she closes the prologue with the following statement: "However sobered I may be by a religious heritage which must at many key historical junctures be condemned as deeply dishonourable, and however humbled by my own culpable construction within it, I am honoured to confess that, striving to be aware of both my response and my responsibility, I read and write under the sign of the Christian" (19). Some queer theorists have been accused of finding homoeroticism under every rock, and I wonder if Bowen's Christian interpretation similarly goes too far in reading, say, Lively and her protagonist in Moon Tiger as "return[ing] to God" and Winterson's prose as "shot through with the trace of the incommensurable, of the Other, even perhaps with what Levinas would call the 'God in passing' " (119).