John Neary

Stanley Kubrick's film Eyes Wide Shut and Nathaniel Hawthorne's classic tale "Young Goodman Brown," which present uncannily similar stories, exemplify the book's theme: both are examples of a "dark-side" narrative. In each case a limited, naive protagonist goes out, at night, into the darkness and mostra altro discovers things about himself and the world that he previously was unaware of. It is a disturbing discovery of imperfection and seeming perversity - an encounter with the Jungian "shadow," a hidden and feared dimension of the human person. But it is also an experience "of what Christian theologian Paul Tillich calls "depth," an encounter with groundless mystery -indeed, for Tillich this is an encounter with the reality that people refer to when using the word "God." That a discovery of apparent perversity may be an illuminating experience of the divine is a paradox that lies at the heart of the mystery of each individual's "shadow," no longer to be considered as a bundle of repressed negativity but as a harbinger of growth and soul, a doorway to spiritual illumination. In Shadows and Illuminations this paradox of dark-side narratives - that shadow is illuminative - is explored in relation to a variety of classic and contemporary literary works. John Neary is a professor of English at St. Norbert College in Wisconsin, USA; he received degrees at the University of Notre Dame and the University of California, Irvine. He has written two previous books on the topic of religion and literature -Something and Nothingness: The Fiction of John Updike and John Fowles and Like and Unlike God: Religious Imaginations in Modern and Contemporary Fiction. mostra meno