Norman W Jones

The Ohio State University, English, Faculty Member

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Norman W. Jones is the author of Provincializing the Bible: Faulkner and Postsecular American Literature (Routledge 2018), The Bible and Literature: The Basics (Routledge 2016) and Gay and Lesbian Historical Fiction: Sexual Mystery and Post-Secular Narrative (Palgrave Macmillan 2007). He is also co-editor of The King James Bible after 400 Years: Literary, Linguistic, and Cultural Influences (Cambridge University Press 2010). His essays and reviews have been published in American Literary History Online Review, American Literature, Christianity & Literature, Modern Fiction Studies, and Studies in American Fiction.

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Richard Amesbury

Arizona State University

David Seamon

Kansas State University

Beverly Haviland

Brown University

Adam Afterman

Tel Aviv University

Johnson Thomaskutty

The United Theological College, Bangalore

Lucas R . Platero

Universidad Rey Juan Carlos

Steven Weitzman

University of Pennsylvania

S. Jonathon O'Donnell

University College Dublin

Karen Barad

University of California, Santa Cruz

Paola Bacchetta

University of California, Berkeley

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Papers by Norman W Jones

The Words and Their Afterlives

Select bibliography on the King James Bible

The King James Bible after Four Hundred Years

Unexpected Heroes and Miraculous Recreations

The Bible and Literature: The Basics, 2015

Provincializing the Bible

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The King James Bible after Four Hundred Years: Introduction

Post-Secular Queer: Christianity, Queer Theory, and the Unsolvable Mysteries of Sexual Desire

Intersections in Christianity and Critical Theory, 2010

What could Christianity and queer theory possibly have in common? The two are often considered an... more What could Christianity and queer theory possibly have in common? The two are often considered anathema to each other. Queer theory is generally committed to an existential skepticism regarding the possibility of a transcendent, divine source of meaning. Its intellectual lineage can be traced to Friedrich Nietzsche, who famously articulated such skepticism by asserting, ‘God is dead.’ Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals provides the template for queer theory’s assertion that the concept of an ethically normative hierarchy of hetero- versus homosexuality is the contingent product of a specific historical context. While many Christians consider this and other ethically normative concepts to be non-contingent in the sense of being ‘natural’ or divinely mandated, Nietzsche insists that ethical norms are merely the invention of human cultures in particular historical moments – they have a genealogy, a history. In The History of Sexuality Michel Foucault (1978) develops this thinking in regard to sexuality, arguing that sexual morality and indeed the very concept of sexuality have a history. This argument, one of the defining landmarks of queer theory, entails not just empirical but also epistemological claims: it assumes the kind of existential skepticism toward transcendent sources of meaning emblematized by Nietzsche. Thus in contemporary US politics, debates concerning sexual ethics are often stymied by an underlying disagreement about the epistemological grounds of the debate itself: by definition, it seems, Christianity and queer theory are not on speaking terms.

The Bible and Literature: The Basics

The Bible and Literature: The Basics, 2015

Introduction: The Bible as Witness to the Power of Stories Chapter 1. Wrestling with God: The Bib... more Introduction: The Bible as Witness to the Power of Stories Chapter 1. Wrestling with God: The Bible as an Untellable Tale Chapter 2. Friends, Family, and Lovers: A Familiar God Chapter 3. Crime and Punishment Chapter 4. Unexpected Heroes and Miraculous Recreations Chapter 5. The Words and Their Afterlives Conclusion: A Secular Age? A Note on English Bible Translations Online Resources Additional Secondary Sources Index

Eucharistically Queer?: The Postsecular as Transnational Reading Strategy in The Book of Salt

Studies in American Fiction, 2014

Truong is not alone among contemporary writers in the U.S. who challenge the national boundaries ... more Truong is not alone among contemporary writers in the U.S. who challenge the national boundaries of "American" literature in part by invoking traditional spiritual beliefs and practices. Widely known and noteworthy examples include Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony (1977), Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987), Tony Kushner's Angels in America (1992/3), and Ana Castillo's So Far from God (1993). Some critics, such as John A. McClure, argue that representations of spirituality in such texts are highly significant. 4 Indeed, Amy Hungerford examines the writings of Allen Ginsburg, Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy, Toni Morrison, and Marilynne Robinson, concluding, like McClure, that postmodern representations of spirituality lie at the center of much of the most widely respected imaginative literature produced in the U.S. over the past half century. 5 Yet the brief but rich critical reception history of The Book of Salt suggests that there remains a widespread willingness among scholars to ignore representations of spirituality-presumably because such representations are, at best, atavistic and therefore irrelevant or, at worst, reactionary. Most critics would likely be quite comfortable with the ways in which Truong's novel implicitly critiques the role of Catholicism in the French colonization of Vietnam: the novel specifically highlights the complicity of Catholic institutions and theology in racist, sexist, heterosexist, and economic oppressions. Far more interesting and innovative, however, are the subtle ways in which the novel also simultaneously embraces key elements of Catholicism. Most provocatively, The Book of Salt invokes the Catholic Eucharist liturgy less in an attempt to queer it-to make it strange, subverting it in eroticized ways that transgress social norms 6-than to use traditional Eucharistic theology to help represent historical, sexual, racial, and national difference and disjunction as paradoxically enabling rather than thwarting a sense of connection, fostering a sense of anti-assimilationist community across such lines of difference. My exploration of this aspect of the novel develops in three stages. First, I explain how the novel represents food, sex, and reading as interrelated metaphors for abjected difference, and how it uses these metaphors to help develop a complex meditation on the specific set of differences embodied in the protagonist. Next, I analyze how the novel's subtle use of Eucharistic symbolism resonates with its food and sex metaphors, complicating them productively. Finally, turning back to the novel's representations of reading, I contend that the insistently mysterious questioning that is characteristic of The Book of Salt gets inflected by Eucharistic symbolism-as well as by invocations of spirituality more broadly-in ways that suggest postsecular notions of subjectivity and history and that implicitly commend the postsecular as a transnational reading strategy.

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Coming Out through History's Hidden Love Letters in Absalom, Absalom!

American Literature, 2004

... in Be-tween Men).8 In distinction from such readings, I contend that Absa-lom tracks the disa... more

The King James Bible after 400 Years: Literary, Linguistic, and Cultural Influences

Renaissance and Reformation, 2012

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Postsecular Reading as Eucharistically Queer

Provincializing the Bible

The Literary as Biblical

Provincializing the Bible

Mysterious Hauntings and Revisionist Histories

William Faulkner’s 1936 novel, Absalom, Absalom!, opens with the increasingly insistent evocation... more William Faulkner’s 1936 novel, Absalom, Absalom!, opens with the increasingly insistent evocation of a question: why does Miss Rosa choose Quentin to hear the history she tells? She claims that her purpose is financial: she imagines Quentin selling her story to a magazine some day, perhaps when he is newly married and in need of extra money. However, in what becomes a recurring theme of hermeneutic doubt and indeterminacy, contrary evidence leads Quentin to suspect that Miss Rosa has undisclosed motivations. The “queer archaic sheet of ancient good notepaper” she sends him as a “summons, out of another world almost,” suggests that she aims at more than offering him a merely marketable tale: “It’s because she wants it told” (5; italics in original). Quentin first decides that she might simply need to explain the Civil War through her history, but he rejects this answer because it does not account for her need of him. Miss Rosa is a writer and could pen the story herself. Quentin’s fa...

Eggshell Shibboleths as Intertextual Marginalization

Introduction Spot the Homo: Definitions

Alice Walker’s 1982 Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel, The Color Purple, models its protagonist on Wal... more Alice Walker’s 1982 Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel, The Color Purple, models its protagonist on Walker’s own grandmother: the narrative begins with the brutal reality of the grandmother’s life and then transforms it into a fairy tale ending. A lesbian romance serves as a catalyst for this transformation. As I elaborate in chapter 3, some object to this transformation for deriving from an anachronistic projection of Walker’s own values onto a historical figure who probably did not share those same values, then falsifying the actual history to suit Walker’s desires. This kind of objection takes the story too literally: it is fiction, not history; to judge historical fiction by the standards of nonfiction history is to misunderstand fiction. Walker identifies her protagonist with an actual historical figure for various reasons, but especially to explore and articulate certain mysteries inherent in sex, and how these mysteries, despite being unsolvable, can serve as a catalyst and foundat...

Coming-Out Stories As Conversion Narratives

As I note at the beginning of my introduction, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1982) has been cr... more As I note at the beginning of my introduction, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1982) has been criticized by Lauren Berlant, Robert Towers, and others for what they consider its incoherent and unbelievable transformation from brutal, seemingly bleak realism to fairy tale ending. The novel echoes Walker’s grandmother’s life, which began as the novel begins with childhood rape, childbearing, and abuse. It ends in an entirely different, even utopian mood: Celie, the protagonist, inherits a house, develops a profitable and artistically fulfilling business, reunites with her long-lost sister, becomes friends with her once-abusive-now-reformed husband, and achieves greater wisdom and enjoyment of life as the result of a sexual and spiritual awakening. The critics have a point—the change is startling and certainly does not seem probable, especially in light of its historical setting in the rural early twentieth-century South. Even so, I argue that the change makes sense in terms of the log...

Romancing the Past: The Uses of Identification

Mary Renault ranks as one of the most famous writers of gay and lesbian historical fiction. Her f... more Mary Renault ranks as one of the most famous writers of gay and lesbian historical fiction. Her first gay-themed historical fiction novel, The Last of the Wine, appeared in 1956, a decade and a half before the Stonewall riots; it chronicles a romance between two Athenian young men during the fifth-century BCE Peloponnesian War. Two of her later novels, Fire from Heaven (1969) and The Persian Boy (1972), narrate the life of fourth-century BCE Greek military commander and emperor, Alexander the Great; the novels focus on Alexander’s romances with men: the first with Hephaistion, the second with the Persian eunuch, Bagoas. These novels continue to be popular among lesbian and gay readers. They have also influenced subsequent portrayals of Alexander the Great, including Oliver Stone’s 2004 film, Alexander. Like Renault, Stone emphasizes Alexander’s relationship with another man, Hephaistion, as the primary romantic attachment of his life: “it was said later that Alexander was never defe...

Chronology of major English Bible translations to 1957

Literary, Linguistic, and Cultural Influences, 2010

To the Lighthouse and biblical language

Literary, Linguistic, and Cultural Influences, 2010

Chronology of English Bible translations since 1957

Literary, Linguistic, and Cultural Influences, 2010

The Words and Their Afterlives

Select bibliography on the King James Bible

The King James Bible after Four Hundred Years

Unexpected Heroes and Miraculous Recreations

The Bible and Literature: The Basics, 2015

Provincializing the Bible

Download

The King James Bible after Four Hundred Years: Introduction

Post-Secular Queer: Christianity, Queer Theory, and the Unsolvable Mysteries of Sexual Desire

Intersections in Christianity and Critical Theory, 2010

The Bible and Literature: The Basics

The Bible and Literature: The Basics, 2015

Eucharistically Queer?: The Postsecular as Transnational Reading Strategy in The Book of Salt

Studies in American Fiction, 2014

Download

Coming Out through History's Hidden Love Letters in Absalom, Absalom!

American Literature, 2004

... in Be-tween Men).8 In distinction from such readings, I contend that Absa-lom tracks the disa... more

The King James Bible after 400 Years: Literary, Linguistic, and Cultural Influences

Renaissance and Reformation, 2012

Download

Postsecular Reading as Eucharistically Queer

Provincializing the Bible

The Literary as Biblical

Provincializing the Bible

Mysterious Hauntings and Revisionist Histories

Eggshell Shibboleths as Intertextual Marginalization

Introduction Spot the Homo: Definitions

Coming-Out Stories As Conversion Narratives

Romancing the Past: The Uses of Identification

Chronology of major English Bible translations to 1957

Literary, Linguistic, and Cultural Influences, 2010

To the Lighthouse and biblical language

Literary, Linguistic, and Cultural Influences, 2010

Chronology of English Bible translations since 1957

Literary, Linguistic, and Cultural Influences, 2010

Gay and Lesbian Historical Fiction: Sexual Mystery and Post-Secular Narrative

_Gay and Lesbian Historical Fiction: Sexual Mystery and Post-Secular Narrative_, demonstrates for... more _Gay and Lesbian Historical Fiction: Sexual Mystery and Post-Secular Narrative_, demonstrates formal and thematic similarities between queer and Christian discourses of identification, transformation, and community in twentieth- and twenty-first-century American literature. In doing so, this study re-values a critically dismissed genre--gay and lesbian historical fiction, of which it provides an annotated bibliography--and develops conceptual resources for ethical discussion of homosexuality.

The Bible and Literature: The Basics

The Bible and Literature: The Basics provides an interpretive framework for understanding the sig... more The Bible and Literature: The Basics provides an interpretive framework for understanding the significance of biblical allusions in literature—even for readers who have little prior knowledge of the Bible. In doing so, it surveys the Bible’s influence on a broad range of English, American, and other Anglophone literatures from a variety of historical periods. It also:

- offers a "greatest hits" tour of the Bible
- focuses as much on 20th- and 21st-century literatures as on earlier periods
- addresses the Bible’s relevance to contemporary issues in literary criticism such as poststructuralist, postcolonial, feminist, queer, and narrative theories
- includes discussion questions for each chapter and annotated suggestions for further reading

This book explains why readers need a basic knowledge of the Bible in order to understand and appreciate key aspects of Anglophone literary traditions.

Provincializing the Bible: Faulkner and Postsecular American Literature

Why, in our supposedly secular age, does the Bible feature prominently in so many influential and... more Why, in our supposedly secular age, does the Bible feature prominently in so many influential and innovative works of contemporary U.S. literature? More pointedly, why would a book indelibly allied with a long history of institutionalized oppressions play a supporting role—and not simply as an object of critique—in a wide variety of landmark literary representations of marginalized subjectivities? The answers to these questions go beyond mere playful re-appropriations or subversive resignifications of biblical themes, figures, and forms. This book shows how certain contemporary authors invoke the Bible in ways that undermine clear distinctions between "subversive" and "traditional"—indeed, that undermine clear distinctions between "secular" and "sacred." By tracing a key source of such complex literary invocations of the Bible back to William Faulkner’s major novels, Provincializing the Bible argues that these literary works, which might be termed postsecular, ironically provincialize the Bible as a means of reevaluating and revalorizing its significance in contemporary American culture.

The King James Bible after 400 Years: Literary, Linguistic, and Cultural Influences

Norman W Jones

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