How do you explain Sanderson’s interest in the robust, rules-based magic systems that have become his raison d’être ? Is a Mormon explanation warranted? Is it sufficient?

I can see at least four explanations — all of them likely valid in varying amounts:

Mormonism as doctrine: in Mormon doctrine spirit is matter more refined and miracles are simply higher order physics. Magic that has rules as physics does and even some cases use physical materials ties very well in to Mormon doctrine.

Mormonism as community: Sanderson has been influenced by the work of Orson Scott Card (the Alvin books, How to Write Science Fiction & Fantasy, etc.) and David Farland (Runelords) and their penchant for rigorous magic systems.

Trends in literature: Sanderson came of age at the tail end of the fuzzy, soft magics found in the derivative post-Tolkien fantasy (Eddings, Brooks) and so, he, like other writers of his generation is both acutely aware of the flaws in soft magic and has the need to differentiate his work from his predecessors (this is oversimplifying the whole magic in fantasy debate/history, but it’s roughly enough true to serve my purpose here).

Trends in pop culture: Sanderson is a known player of role-playing games, including the various editions of Dungeons & Dragons. He’s also an inveterate collector of Magic: The Gathering cards. Clearly, someone who grows up with the precise rules and game mechanics and character stats of RPGs is going to be attracted to hard magic systems.

This is a straightforward example, but I think it illustrates well how neither an overemphasis on Mormon themes nor an elision of Mormon themes are likely to be useful in literary criticism of work by Mormon authors. Mormon literary criticism is a hybrid form — just like Mormon literature. Try as we might, when it comes to artistic or creative expression, we are in the world and of the world and yet not quite. We should rightly focus on the not quite — but not at the expense of all the rest.

This is a fair charge. Indeed the genre-ecumenicalism of the “literary” wing of Mormon literature as typified by the AML Awards and the fiction and poetry published in Dialogue and Irreantum expresses itself most often in a thematic way. That is, although any achievement of craftmanship by a Mormon writer has a shot of being published or awarded or reviewed or written about critically, it is much more likely to be so if it contains themes that have strong tie-ins to the Mormon worldview. There is a limit, of course, to the genre-ecumenicalism of this wing of the field — romance and thriller, for example, rarely get attention. Most of the genre works that do are mystery and, especially, speculative fiction. And part of the reason why is because of the ease in which the work’s themes can be tied in to Mormonism in a rich way.

This is opposed to the “genre wing” as typified by the Whitney Awards and LDStorymakers, which cares less about thematic elements (insofar as they are present, they are present to appeal to a Mormon audience) and more about storytelling and the demands of the readership (especially in regards to appropriateness). But even there, themes comes in to play whenever attempts are made to explain or understand narrative art in relation to Mormonism.

Now I make that claim while not having done an exhaustive survey of all the reviews and critical essays in the Mormon journals or of all the papers presented at AML annual meetins or at LTUE panels. However, in my experience, Rosalynde is correct in that, generally speaking, when critical readings of texts by Mormon authors (whether featuring Mormon characters or settings or not) are done for a Mormon audience; and when the appeal of works by Mormon authors to Mormon audiences are explained; and when the appeal of certain genres to Mormon authors (especially speculative fiction and YA) are explained what is most often invoke is Mormon doctrine, worldview, ritual, history or symbolism. Or in other words: Mormon themes.

And so on that shaky evidence, I would like to raise two major issues:

The first is that theme and form aren’t easily separated. They intertwine. Themes develop across a work and are dramatized within the form and deployed with the aesthetics of that form. It does no good to point out that Alvin Maker is an analog to Joseph Smith without dealing with how that works within the alternate history/folk magic world that Orson Scott Card creates. And it’s quite obvious that Alvin’s story develops in certain ways that Joseph Smith’s didn’t because of the demands of the form. On the other hand, there are times that the thematic need to hew to the Joseph Smith story distort, perhaps, the norms of that type of genre fiction.

The second is that I’m not sure why theme has nothing to do with art and aesthetics. I may be out of my realm here (and Rosalynde does seem to be using “art” in the quote above to focus specifically on form and especially formal experimentation and most especially art as highbrow art), but it’s not clear to me how theme doesn’t have anything to do with art. In fact, quite the opposite — it has everything to do with art. Indeed, art that ignores theme is lifeless art. Theme animates and adds dimension to narrative.

Moreover, Rosalynde conflates Mormon thematics with “religious themes.” The problem there is that Mormonism contains within it all sorts of themes that go beyond simple issues of religion (say, of faith and lack of faith, and religious rites and displays). In fact, when our genre authors tap in to Mormon themes, they rarely focus on faith as a theme. Issues of agency, creation and creativity, power and leadership, adolescence and maturity, community insiders and outsiders, innocence and experience, endurance and self-control are much more often thematized in Mormon genre fiction, especially speculative fiction, which receives the lion’s share of critical attention. And in many works, even though Mormonism can be highlighted in relation to the theme, the themes can also often be viewed as the central thematics of the genres and sub-genres the authors are working in, and are often in dialogue with other works in the field that are not by Mormon authors. That complicates matters for those who are doing Mormon criticism, but it also suggests that a Mormon aesthetic is not in opposition to art or genre, highbrow or low, but rather overlaps with, affirms, interrogates and stretches the aesthetics and the thematics of the field. This may be less true of the works that are specifically geared towards the Mormon market, but even there you may find these same dynamics in play because the bottom line is that almost no writers of or readers of or critics of Mormon themed works read Mormon works exclusively.

Now even though I make these two points I do think that Rosalynde is correct in pointing out that typically Mormon criticism has focused too much on thematics and not enough on form. And I’m interested in ways that Mormon criticism can expand beyond the pointing at Mormon themes in works by Mormon authors and do a better job of situating such works in the overall context of whichever genres/forms/traditions/trends are appropriate to the work and author (thus my recent post on Brandon Sanderson and deification).

In my next post in this series I’ll look at how Rosalynde provides an alternative way of understanding Mormon fiction as a phenomenon and where that understanding may be useful to Mormon critics and where it may break down.

*a problematic observation in its own right because Shakespeare is an artist of genres working in a pre-novel (and thus pre-literary fiction as genre) world (a point Wraith of Blake makes at BCC)

I mention this because I think his work deserves closer examination. And what I’d like to see is less the reading of his works through the lens of Mormon culture, doctrine and history (such as has been done with Stephenie Meyer’s work) and more a through study of this preoccupation as a dialogue across his work and then a situating of that work in relation to notions of power (and especially super power) in fantasy. That is, it’d be relatively easy to do some basic deliniation of how the LDS doctrine of deification translates in to the themes realized in the Mistborn Trilogy and Warbreaker (and to a lesser extent Elantris and The Way of Kings). What could be much more interesting is what the texts themselves do that’s different from or similar to the general field of epic fantasy. This would be a different type of search for Mormon exceptionalism that would focus on the work itself rather than perceptions of Mormon underpinnings/the search for LDS traces.

This is a half-baked thought, to be sure. But it’s one of the things that I’ve been thinking about lately as a way to think about what Mormon literary criticism could/should do.

It may well be, however, that the development of literary theory is itself overdetermined by complications inherent in its very project and unsettling with regard to its status as a scientific discipline. Resistance may be a built-in constituent of its discourse, in a manner that would be inconceivable in the natural sciences and unmentionable in the social sciences. It may well be, in other words, that the polemical opposition, the systemic non-understanding and misrepresentation, the unsubstantial but eternally recurrent objections, are the displaced symptoms of a resistance inherent in the theoretical enterprise itself. To claim that this would be sufficient reason not to envisage doing literary theory would be like rejecting anatomy because it has failed to cure mortality. The real debate of literary theory is not with its polemical opponents but rather with its methodological assumptions and possibilities. Rather than asking why literary theory is threatening, we should perhaps ask why it has such difficulty going about its business and why it lapses so readily either into the language of self-justification and self-defense or else into the overcompensation of a programmatically euphoric utopianism. (13)

I wonder if one of the major tensions in the Mormon literary world, even when the theory being done isn’t on an academic level, but rather consists of readerly or writerly reactions to the issues of the field (including that pesky Shakespeares and Miltons quote), is that we get hung up on self-justification or overcompensation, and, yes, programmatic utopias. We seem to expend quite a bit of energy slipping around in the mires of what the boundaries are, of what the futures are, of what the major figures are and what they mean, of what “should be done.” These are natural debates to involve ourselves in and seem to be especially endemic to minority /minor literatures and, as de Man explains, are simply inherent to the field.

Or to put it another way: it’s hard to define and evaluate Mormon literature because it’s, well, literature.

But just because it’s difficult, doesn’t mean that it’s invalid (in both senses of the word). And perhaps we need to be about our business more and worry less about the justifications and the overcompensations.

How did you first come in to contact with Mormon literature?

At college. When I began my postgraduate studies, you had to follow three different steps. First one was going back to class. One year taking some new lectures, getting ready a few essays and getting good marks. Then you had to write like a little dissertation, a first attempt. People usually took advantage of it to write a chapter, or a couple sections of their future dissertation. Third step was writing the dissertation. In the first step, I took a lecture on Western American literature. There, the professor who was to become my advisor gave us to read a short story by Phyllis Barber and he told us a little bit about Mormon history. He also pointed out that nobody was researching the Mormons in Europe. Most of my fellow students were interested in Chicanos, Basque-Americans and so on. Me too, but I wanted to do something about rock lyrics from a literary perspective. I was not brave enough to propose that topic though and when I was desperately looking for a topic for the second step, I went upstairs and I told that professor that I was thinking about researching Phyllis Barber and the Mormons.

Why did you decide to do your dissertation on the work of Phyllis Barber? What about her work led you to decide that it was a viable project?

I say in my introduction to the dissertation that it was “by accident” that it was Barber whom I came to know first. And it’s plain truth. That first short story I read was “Mormon Levis”. I thought it was a pretty good piece of fiction, and some of the inner motivations of the story were a mystery to me. I began reading the rest of her fiction and I did not stop discovering new things and new mysteries that I wanted to resolve. But my conviction came after the decision. In that sense, it was a good love story, a real love story. It was not “love at first sight”. I had to work hard on that relationship, reading and rereading, making questions and leaving them unanswered. I found a literary body which was complex and compelling. Her fiction led me to so many different paths, paths in which my own involvement was as important as understanding what she was saying. When I was done reading all her work I realized I had taken the right decision, but the decision had already been taken anyway. Now I know I took one of the best ways to understand Mormonism and Mormon literature. In my dissertation, I talk about the idea of the “middle way” as a moral stance, both personal and universal, in which the risks taken gave more value to Phyllis Barber’s literature. That was the main reason why I thought hers was the best work to make this project viable, as you said.

You mention in the AML-List email announcing the completion of your dissertation that you used the frames of Western American and Minority Literature for your dissertation. Could you explain that a little further and also reference a few of the literary theorists or works of theory that helped inform the critical approaches you bring to Barber’s work?

To use Western American literature as a frame was a given to me. I mean, that was the space in which I get involved with Mormon literature. I was taught that the Mormons were a very important part in the history of the West, so at the beginning I took that frame for granted. Then I realized it was the good one. Historically the Mormons have played a very important role in the pioneering of the West and the Church is still based on Utah, even though I am aware of the growing internationalization of the Church. But we approach the West assuming the new theories which try to revisit Western history and literature from a new perspective, considering the influence of mythical constructions and the repossession of silenced voices. I think that that has to do with Minority literature as well. Mormons need a voice in a new and wider canon. It was interesting when I placed Barber’s fiction together with John Okada, Rudolfo Anaya, Toni Morrison, Robert Laxalt and Philip Roth in one of my old programs. I’m not teaching literature anymore, but when I did it Barber’s fiction and Mormon fiction worked very well in that context. In any case, the new approaches to the West have shown how certain cultural standards are influential enough so as to define who we are or who we are supposed to be. That tension is universal and appealing and Mormon literature, from either a social or an individual dimension, helps to show this tension with a particular set of characteristics.

My approach to Barber is threefold. There are four sections, but I would say that the critical body is threefold: feminism, ecocriticism and a blend of cultural and moral approaches. That is why I used different critical methodologies and the work from different theorists. It would take too long to explain now how I go from Nancy Chodorow or Adrienne Rich to Maxime Hanks or Lavina Fielding Anderson, how I also rely on Youngbear-Tibbets, Cheryll Glotfelty or Paul Gilroy to talk about place and how I mention Robert Bird or John Gardner. I thought this could be a hindrance but I really believe that the multiplicity of approaches was necessary to execute a complete and thorough analysis of Barber’s literary work.

Related to the previous question, I’d also be interested in hearing about how you situate Mormon literature as a Minority Literature. As you know, traditionally, it has been mainly written about as a sub-set of American Western Regionalism. I have long felt that critical theories about ethnic and minority (even minor) literatures could be useful in approaching Mormon literature, and a bit of my work in graduate school and some of my blogging has explored this notion, but certainly my work is nowhere near the depth of what would go in to a dissertation. Where do you see the value in theorizing Mormon literature as Minority Literature and where, maybe, is the fit not quite right?

It’s risky for me to talk about value. I’m still too far away. But I do see the value. From an international perspective, or talking as an outsider, placing Mormon literature within the frame of Minority literatures could be a good way to give visibility to certain Mormon writers and to Mormon literature as a whole. Maybe I’m hesitant about making that sort of statements because I’m still feeling like I’m stepping in grounds which do not belong to me. This may sound as an excuse, as if I was answering your question in a roundabout way, but I need to say it. When I began I had very clear in mind that it was compulsory to be very respectful with this culture and with everything involving faith or religion. That is why I ended up approaching Mormonism from a social and cultural perspective rather than considering it entirely as a religious movement. I took Mormonism as an ethnic category, a tight-knitted group with certain cultural and social values which made them fitting to go for an ethnic consideration. I obviously read the work by people like William Mulder or Eugene England talking about these issues and I agree with them.

If it is regional or minor, I am not really that friend of labels. Sometimes I feel that talking about minorities is just a way of trying to get rid of the bad attributes that certain scholars and critics have given to regional literature. But both regional and minor can go so universal as to express feelings, emotions and reflections which cross borders.

Obviously, your work has had some resonance with the Academy because your dissertation was awarded the status of summa cum laude, but could you talk about how your work has been received by your fellow European academics? And how is Mormonism as culture viewed generally? Is it seen as a minority/ethnic literature a religious thing or what?

My fellows are very busy, you know what I mean. Before getting done with all this, I already started giving publicity to it. I’ve been attending like two international conferences each year since I began some seven years ago. I have been reading papers in all of them and all of them were dealing with Mormonism or Barber, so I guess that there was some interest in the topic. A recent article has been published in a Spanish magazine and some of my articles have been included in books. So I guess that there is a certain degree of interest in Mormonism.

I’m reluctant to say that Mormon literature is totally unknown in European academia. I’m not familiar with the work being done in a lot of universities and it would sound very pretentious to say that I am the only one dealing with Mormonism, but it is still a topic to be discovered here in Spain or the Basque Country. I’m sure that some scholars are familiar with Terry Tempest Williams, Anne Perry or Stephenie Meyer, but I guess they don’t know that they are Mormons or they don’t see it as an ingredient to be considered. A few weeks ago I found a book by Orson Scott Card in a mall, translated to Spanish. It was like finding a treasure, but I guess it’s not so weird. Mormonism is basically perceived as a religion, and its literature is still waiting to be studied. I’m trying to give it visibility from the perspective of an ethnic group because I think that it helps to make the label wider and more complex, but different approaches could be workable. As an example, I could tell you that many of my fellows have shown a big interest in Barber and Mormon literature from a feminist point of view. In any case, we could discuss a lot about this issue or, in fact, about any of the previous questions you made. I’m trying to be short here.

What other works by Mormon artists — writers, visual artists, musicians, etc. — do you find interesting, entertaining, valuable, etc.? What about art in general — what’s rocking your world right now?

Darrell Spencer, Carol Lynn Pearson, Orson Scott Card, Terry Tempest Williams, John Bennion, Levi Peterson, Virgina Sorensen, Brady Udall, Douglas Thayer, Vardis Fisher, Levi Peterson, Stephenie Meyer, Eric Samuelsen, Anne Perry, Linda Sillitoe, Lance Larsen, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Warren Hatch, Maurine Whipple, Patricia Gunter Karamesines, Neil LaBute… You see, different bonds to the Church, different genres, different styles. All those are some of the names I have read and I think that they all deserve attention. I need to refresh my learning anyway. There are a lot of things I’m missing, some of them from contemporary Mormon literature. I guess I’ll need some guide to help me with the market and the newest writers. That’s why I keep on visiting some websites, A Motley Vision among them. I’m reading Brady Udall now, I’m planning to read a book by Coke Newell, I wanna know more about the poets being mentioned in my dissertation just by reference or because I read a couple poems. I’m discovering a lot of new poets in Patricia Gunter’s WIZ, which has been a great discovery to me. And I wanna re-listen to some music but from another perspective. I love rock music, and I will try to revisit The Killers, Low or Arthur “Killer” Kane from a different perspective. I also want to learn more about the cinema, you know, I saw a few movies: Baptists at Our Barbecue, Mobsters and Mormons or The Work and the Glory and one with Anne Hathaway about a Mormon missionary which is a recurrent film here at 4 o’clock on Saturdays when they don’t know what to put on air. I know I’m missing a lot of stuff.

If you ask about other stuff, not dealing with Mormonism, I’m involved in some literary projects. I have a lot of stuff to do at college, and I keep open some other options.

Finally, what’s next for you? Do you plan to generate more work from your dissertation work? What other projects — related to Mormon letters or not — are you working on/planning on?

You know what they say about a woman who gets pregnant. After they give birth, people say that they can go through a little depression. Okey, I gave birth to a little baby who weighed 600 hundred pages. I’m a bit lost now, trying to recover my composure and rhythm. I’m trying to start new researching projects. I took some days to read some other stuff and work in some other topics. Willy Vlautin, a good writer from the West and Richmond Fontaine’s leading singer has been a great help and a lot of poets and writers from Spain who are usually published in underground publishers and that I admire. But I’ll come back to Mormon literature, you bet. I read a lot of fiction by Mormons and there are a lot of things which can add something new to what we are doing here. I want to keep on working on Barber. Raw Edges came too late for me, and I included it in the dissertation in a rush. I want to go back to it, and I know that Phyllis is getting ready new things. Besides I aim at getting published the dissertation or at least part of it. And that means refining and polishing so I still have work ahead.

I am also very much interested in other aspects of the West, especially from an ecocritical perspective. I’m a member of a research project sponsored by the Spanish government called REWEST and whose head is Professor David Río, who was the advisor of my dissertation. We’re involved in a lot of stuff, starting with a seminar taking place in a couple months with Cheryll Glotfelty and María Herrera Sobek among others. Last October we organized the II International Conference on the American West and it was a great pleasure to have with us writers such as Gregory Martin or Bernardo Atxaga and scholars like Nancy Cook, Neil Campbell or David Fenimore. Particularly amazing to me was to meet Phyllis. Her participation in our conference was overwhelming. People showed a great interest in her work.

Besides, when I was younger I used to write some fiction. I got some short stories published and I have been lately working together with people writing poetry in underground publishers. I want to recover all that. Some of my poems have been published by Patricia Gunter in WIZ. That’s been like fresh air to my life.

Finally, I have a mortgage to pay, and even though now I’m working at the University of the Basque Country, I have to keep on trying to improve my resume to get a good job, and that is such a big project that it will take half of all my energy. But, you know, we have to endure and keep on trying hard, that’s something I learned from my dad who was an immigrant coming from the South but also from the Mormons.

Thanks, Ángel!

• canon formation and promulgation (especially as presented by anthologies, syllabi and awards
• the intersection of literary and genre fiction, especially literary speculative fiction (slipstream, weird) and speculative literary fiction (allegory, magic realism, folk realism)
• indie/DIY publishing and marketing
• narrative theory, especially point of view and characterization
• censorship and literary production
• small magazines
• theorizing the radical middle
• hilobrow and the middlebrow and related issues (camp, kitsch, avant garde, etc.)
• gaming as storytelling (from pen-and-paper RPGes to FPSes to social gaming)
• fiction and landscape (especially prairie- and desert-scapes)
• authorship and authority (from author interviews and public appearances to uses of social media by)
• authorship and copyright
• collaborative storytelling
• Romanticism and post-Romanticism especially in relation to belated ethnic/minority/national literatures
• the novel as discourse (especially Bakhtin’s notion of heteroglossia)
• aesthetics
• readership and reader response (everything from the cult of the author to strong misreadings to fan fiction)
• representations of faith (and faiths) in narrative art
• history of the book
• the book/film review as literary discourse/form
• Mormon literature as ethnic and/or minor literature
• the history of Mormon literary criticism especially in relation to defining the field of Mormon literature
• humor in fiction
• permutations of narrative art (fiction, film, graphic novel, etc.) and how theory shifts to accomodate these forms

This is why I didn’t go on to a PhD program.

He writes:

Spencer W. Kimball’s “The Gospel Vision of the Arts” is admittedly ubiquitous in discussions of Mormon art and media, and it is usually cited for his predictions of remarkable future accomplishments, for instance that Mormon-themed “masterpieces should run for months in every movie theater, cover every part of the globe in the tongue of the people, written by great artists, purified by the best critics.” But while LDS filmmakers, in this case, have reason to rejoice in this prophetic benediction, it is my firm belief that the most important point is the final one, that the best critics must purify our films and, by extension, other media.

Mine too.

For the launch, I’ve decided to highlight Eugene England’s response to Orson Scott Card’s novel Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus ( Amazon ) because it captures well, I think, a specific, fascinating moment in both of these great men of Mormon letters’ careers.

Title: Pastwatch: The Redemption of Orson Scott Card

Author: Eugene England

Publication Info: Mormon Literature Database; text of a paper presented at Life, the Universe, & Everything XV: An Annual Symposium on the Impact of Science Fiction and Fantasy, Provo, Utah, February 28, 1997

Submitted by: Wm Morris

Why?: Wm says, “What fascinates me about this paper is that it represents an attempt by England to convince himself that OSC is back in his corner (so-to-speak). It is as much about the socio-cultural politics of Mormonism as it is about the novel Pastwatch.”

Participate:

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Read all the Critic’s Corner posts so far

Pres. Uchtdorf said:

True love requires action. We can speak of love all day long—we can write notes or poems that proclaim it, sing songs that praise it, and preach sermons that encourage it—but until we manifest that love in action, our words are nothing but “sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.”

Now that would seem, at first glance, to cast aside the whole notion of expressing love through words. Love without action is dead. Which is why it caught my attention. But notice the verbs used: proclaim, praise, preach. All good methods of discourse, but all intended to drive a didactic response — to provoke action or, in the case of the receiver of the proclamations, reaction.

That’s not how narrative art works. Not exactly. And the more I thought about this talk, the more I wondered why love was important. I feel it is. I know it’s important in my life, that life would be dismal without it, but why?

I’m going to get back to love, but I want to introduce another concept first: progression. Progression is a crucial concept to the Mormon worldview, but it’s also the key point of narrative art. Now that manifests itself in a variety of ways and some works are all about frustrating progression, but even those works don’t exist as literature without the expectation of progression. Or to put it more bluntly: plot is impossible without progression. And narrative art has to have some kind of plot, from the most stereotypical once-again enactment of the hero’s journey to the densest, most absurd fugue of post-modern attempts at stasis, there is always  movement.

Narrative art, especially the best, most durable works of narrative art, helps us understand progression and, more importantly, the barriers to progression. Tragedy does so by exposing the flaws in character and/or the overwhelming forces of nature or society or fate that derail progression. Romance does so by spiraling around the pleasures and frustration of courtship and connection (mainly with others, but also, at times, with nature and with community and with God or ideas). Comedy does so by bursting the barriers and pretenses — personal, social, political, cultural, familial — that we surround ourselves with that too often hinder true progression, that keep us from humility, that bury knowledge and familiarity that we need to have with the other (and other aspects of ourselves that we’ve closed off).

And all of that helps us to love because love is not just some big feeling of warmth, it is a deep investment (and here’s where we get back to the point of Pres. Uchtdorf’s talk) in the progression of others — a deep appreciation of their capacity to progress; an abiding hope that they will progress; a herculean effort to help them progress (but without abridging agency, which is not effective); a mourning with the pain that comes with progression. Love is a bond, but the bonds are created by the experiences that come with progression. If we did not have the capacity to progress, no matter how small and pathetic that progression may be, I don’t think we could love — love is not stasis.

And the beautiful and amazing thing about this mortal condition is that it is clearly set up for conditions of love and progression. The beginning that is birth; the end point that is death. The quick growth and then slow decay of bodies and minds. The passage of time and of the seasons. All these engender a sense of progression (with the added spur of progression in this life not being eternal). Coupling (and all that entails physically and emotionally) and birth and the requirements to survive and grow — the creation of family units and the building of those units in to tribes, communities, societies — all create the conditions of closeness and dependency that lead to love and a deeply felt interest in the progression of others. Yes, there’s also the possibilities for sorrow and pain and, sadly, violence and damnation (or in other words the halting of progression), but it’s supposed to be mainly about love and the rest is so that we don’t all compound in one. There must be struggle.

And this is why the need for narrative art that can truly capture the journey of love and progression is so great — it allows us to step outside our own experience of the conditions of mortality and, if the work of art is good, find windows in to the experience of others. Perhaps we may learn by looking on the vistas revealed. Perhaps we may be entertained. But above all it should cause us to love more and by loving more do more and  have a deeper wisdom on how to go about that doing. To love, truly.

To quote Pres. Uchtdorf again: “Love is what inspired our Heavenly Father to create our spirits; it is what led our Savior to the Garden of Gethsemane to make Himself a ransom for our sins. Love is the grand motive of the plan of salvation; it is the source of happiness, the ever-renewing spring of healing, the precious fountain of hope.”

If love is the grand motive. If love is the source. If love is an ever-renewing spring. Then must we, we who dare to capture this existence in word, love?

• “Telling It Slant: Aiming for Truth in Contemporary Mormon Literature” by William Mulder (6.1.1993) — one of the true classics of Mormon criticism
• “Toward a ‘Marriage Group’ of Contemporary Mormon Short Stories” by B.W. Jorgensen (12.1.2004) — a great, exhaustive round up of Mormon short stories about marriage encapsulated in an excellent framework.
• “Faithful Fiction: ‘Greening Wheat: Fifteen Mormon Short Stories’” by Eugene England (12.1.1985) — in this review of one of the seminal Mormon short story anthologies England teases out the whole notion of faithful fiction.
• “Sensational Virtue: Nineteenth-Century Mormon Fiction and American Popular Taste” by Karen Lynn (9.1.1981) — an pre-Viper on the Hearth look at Mormons in American popular fiction with an emphasis on portrayals of Mormon women and polygamy.

This is just a small sampling of the riches available. I’m particularly looking forward to reading some of the original reviews of works that are now considered part of the Mormon canon (such as it is).

One more thought: what do you think of adding work like what I’ve linked to above to AMV’s Friday Feature rotation?

*Of course, now articles and full editions are dumped in to PDF files, but hey, at least the PDFs are searchable (and the search engine is much faster and more intuitive than what was found in the UofU archive solution), and really it’s the best we could hope for considering the limitations involved.