In 1999, luminaries of Mormon literary criticism like Eugene England, Gideon Burton, Neal Kramer, gathered together for a special issue of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought dedicated entirely to Mormon Literary Criticism, setting the stage for a revival and new vigorous engagement with Mormon literary criticism. There has yet to be another special issue of Dialogue about literary criticism.

            This is not to say that nothing has happened in Mormon literary criticism between 1999 and today, but to illustrate that the revival, even Restoration, of Mormon criticism that Burton and others called for has yet to fully come to pass. I hope today to join and extend the conversation that Burton and others held in 1999 about what Mormon literary criticism should be and should look like, and perhaps, God willing, play some part in the ongoing project of Restoration. I propose that to “effect Zion” and to gather and expound truth, we need a Mormon literary criticism that uses Mormonism to interpret ALL texts and allows those texts to speak to our Mormonism and be changed by the encounter. My remarks today offer a theoretical and theological foundation for such a view of Mormon literary criticism, considering some of the affordances and dangers of such an approach, while ending with a gesture outward to the types of readings that may fit within this theoretical framework.

            To some extent, I have been doing these sorts of readings my entire life—discussions with my dad about deathbed repentance inspired by Return of the Jedi, identifying Christ-figures in Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Transformers, and elsewhere, and most recently thinking about theosis in N.K. Jemisin’s The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms. And I am not alone—John Tanner’s classic essay “Making a Mormon of Milton” operates in this vein, alongside work from Eric Jepson, much of the criticism on Ships of Hagoth, the general approach of Liz Busby’s new podcast Pop Culture on the Apricot Tree, and last year’s essay collection Mormonism and the Movies from BCC Press. Not to mention countless testimonies, anecdotes, and offhand comments from friends and family that “Mormon” a text (to borrow Laura Craner’s phrase from a 2008 blog post on A Motley Vision). So, on what grounds can, and I argue should, we engage in this type of criticism?

            In 1854, John Taylor wrote:

“If there is any truth in heaven, earth, or hell, I want to embrace it; I care not what shape it comes in to me, who brings it, or who believes in it; whether it is popular or unpopular, truth, eternal truth, I wish to float in and enjoy.” 

Then Elder Taylor reminds us that Mormonism is truth, no matter where it is found. As Gideon Burton, and others, have argued, truth can be found in literature. Indeed, Matthew Wickman, English professor at BYU, mentor and friend, writes in his recent spiritual memoir:

“Discussion of this passage often hinges on what these ‘best books’ are, but I am most compelled by what these books do. Learning from ‘the best books’ is necessary, we read, because ‘all have not faith’; that is, ‘the best books’ serve as bridges to spiritual lessons we might learn in some other way. The implication is that truth is diffused across our experience, with ‘the best books’ capturing and presenting it in richer clusters, making it more apparent and appealing to us. In this respect, these books serve as surrogates for the Holy Ghost, guiding us ‘into all truth’ and showing us ‘things to come’ (John 16:13).” (Wickman 62)

Matt reminds us here that the purpose of seeking out ‘the best books’ is to learn lessons and to gather some of the truth that has been diffused throughout heaven, earth, and hell, as John Taylor suggests. To find and gather these truths, to build faith from reading these best books, we need a Mormon literary criticism!

            The Book of Mormon prophet Nephi calls on us to “liken” scripture unto ourselves. Joe Spencer persuasively explores how Nephi himself models this principle of ‘likening’ in his prophetic engagement with Isaiah. Spencer highlights the ways in which Nephi recognizes the specific Jewish context of Isaiah’s prophecies and puts them to a new use and meaning related to his own particular context (177). This is what I believe a Mormon literary criticism must do. In some sense, this is a variation on what Burton lays out in his discussion of Richard Cracroft and Bruce Jorgensen—”fidelity to the Mormon ethos and openness to otherness” as the two complementary, if somewhat paradoxical, values (35).

Literary theory offers a different angle of approaching the ‘likening’ of texts. Rita Felski, in The Limits of Critique, argues that “Sometimes serious thinking calls for a judicious decrease rather than an increase of distance—a willingness to acknowledge and more fully engage our attachments” (192). This is part of what I think is necessary for a Mormon literary criticism—thinking critically and deeply about why I am attached to certain texts and their themes, to interrogate what about them “tastes delicious” as it were. Felski also suggests that “we might place ourselves in front of the text, reflecting on what it unfurls, calls forth, makes possible”, all as part of recognizing “the text’s status as coactor: as something that makes a difference, that helps make things happen” (12). For Felski, meaning is found and created by paying close attention to our attachments to literature and the ways that literary texts move us. Felski’s work here is influenced by Bruno Latour’s object-oriented ontology, which bears some striking similarities to Orson Pratt’s thinking about intelligences.

All of these pieces put together bring me to something that Mark Noll has termed “novelistic theology”. Noll initially developed the term in his work on Harriet Beecher Stowe (I’ve used it elsewhere, notably in my Master’s thesis on James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner). In essence, novelistic theology is grounded in particulars and personal experience, which confound the strictures and dogmas of a systematic theology. Novelistic theology uses the lives and stories of characters to complicate, stretch, and render lived theological principles that would otherwise remain abstract. Novelistic theology allows us, as readers, to remember that the texts we read should speak to our theology as much as our theology should speak to these ‘best books’.

Essentially, novelistic theology is less interested in certainty than practicality—it cares about complicated stories and believes that those stories reveal something about God, something we as readers can discern through careful reading. Scripture, perhaps especially uniquely Mormon scripture, demonstrates this point. I am not making a claim here about the historicity or fictitious nature of scripture, but instead drawing on some of Grant Hardy’s work on the Book of Mormon. Hardy argues that, “If the Book of Mormon is a work of fiction, it is more intricate and clever than has heretofore been acknowledged. And although there is some truth to the charge of didacticism often leveled against it, the fact that everything is deeply embedded in narrative makes it rather more interesting—narratives are always susceptible to multiple interpretations” (xv-xxvi). Hardy’s point here is twofold, 1) the Book of Mormon is narratively complex and 2) narratives always allow for multiple interpretations. That this uniquely Mormon scripture is, as Hardy notes, “a carefully constructed artifact” (xv), suggests to me that there’s a power in using stories and narratives to learn about God. With novelistic theology, we can explore the complicated stories from the “best books”, placing them in conversation with our Mormonism to expound truth.

Indeed, this line of thinking echoes a call to the Church from Brother B.H. Roberts at the turn of the last century. Brother BH discussed two types of disciples, praising a “second sort” that expound revealed truth, doing more than simply regurgitating truths and principles, but seeking to develop and enlarge the truths of Mormonism. He says that:

“The disciples of ”Mormonism,” growing discontented with the necessarily primitive methods which have hitherto prevailed in sustaining the doctrine, will yet take profounder and broader views of the great doctrines committed to the Church; and, departing from mere repetition, will cast them in new formulas; co-operating in the works of the Spirit, until they help to give to the truths received a more forceful expression, and carry it beyond the earlier and cruder stages of its development.” 

If, as Brother BH says, we need disciples to expound truth, then the understanding that we have of truth is limited and incomplete (which the Articles of Faith certainly suggest is the case!). Brother BH calls for all of us as Mormon disciples to do something about this. I believe that one answer to this call is for the Mormon critic to go to heaven, earth, and hell, seeking out the best books and gathering the truths in them in, reading them as Mormon literature, with Mormonism speaking to the literary text and the literary text speaking to Mormonism. We can ‘cast [truths] in new formulas’! “[H]elp to give to the truths received a more forceful expression”!

            Such bold frontiers bring dangers with them. I see three main pitfalls that Mormon critics undertaking the criticism I’ve outlined should be wary of:

1. Prooftexting.
2. Warping ‘truth’.
3. Instrumentalizing texts.

These pitfalls are certainly not unique to the type of criticism I’m advocating for, but they are certainly real dangers. Yet, I believe that a proper engagement of the sort of Mormon literary criticism that I call for avoids these pitfalls.

            The key to avoiding these, and other, pitfalls is twofold, 1) to ground your criticism and analysis in the text itself, and 2) to ensure that the text and Mormonism speak to each other. Embracing this approach and ethos to Mormon literary criticism recognizes that the best books can aid us in expounding the truths of Mormonism in a way that builds faith. If we fail to do these two things, we are certainly in danger of the three cautions I identified.

            Prooftexting occurs when we take bits and pieces of a text to advance an argument that we developed prior to finishing (or reading any of) the text. Many people that engage in a sort of folk literary criticism along the lines I propose do this. It’s a time-honored and longstanding tradition of how to engage with scripture! And it distorts the text, preventing us from accessing the truth(s) it may reveal. To avoid this, we need to consider passages and moments in their full narrative and literary context before we liken them unto ourselves. If we do not fully understand the text on its own terms (which may include leaning into historical context or other such factors, but doesn’t need to), how can we hope to appropriately render that text “Mormon”? Often I encounter prooftexting for various ideological purposes, but to do so lacks the necessary epistemic humility that Mormon literary critics need. We must recognize that truth is truth and if we find ourselves ignoring elements of the text or twisting their meaning in pursuit of ‘truth’, perhaps we’re serving something else.

            This difficulty of assessing whether we are truly pursuing truth or something else contributes to the second potential pitfall, “warping ‘truth’”. This is a double danger—when we put Mormonism in conversation with any given text, we risk warping truths from Mormonism AND from the text. Whereas prooftexting, largely occurs by cherry-picking textual evidence to support a preconceived conclusion, ‘warping truth’ can be more subtle, occurring at almost any stage of the analysis. If we are engaged in the expounding of truth and doctrine that Brother BH calls us to, then this is almost inevitable. To avoid warping truth and to correct any warping that has occurred incidentally, we must practice fidelity to the text(s) we’re analyzing and to Mormonism. And, importantly, the Mormon critic must exercise caution and humility, inviting and encouraging engagement with their ideas—a Eugene England-esque critical dialogue about the text, as it were. 

            The failure to do this may result in the third pitfall, “Instrumentalizing the Text”. Here, I mean using the text as a means to an end, rather than something engaged on its own terms. This may manifest most commonly as a sort of apologetic reading, a ‘Mormon’ reading of a text that serves to simply affirm Mormonism, where the value of the text becomes its evidence for some outside goal or argument (Mormon folk readings of CS Lewis are often a blend of instrumentalizing and prooftexting). Leaning into novelistic theology is one of the key ways to avoid this—to recognize that the whole point of reading and likening these best books unto ourselves is to be transformed by them—to wrestle with the complications and tensions and gaps between the world as we understood it and the world as the text understands it. 

            And finally, as promised, let’s gesture towards some of the readings made possible within this theoretical framework:

1. An analysis of N.K. Jemisin’s The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms I actually wrote for a special issue of SFRA, edited by Adam McLain, focused on theosis and polygamy, thinking about what Jemisin’s novel suggests about theosis and the ways it does and doesn’t fit neatly within a ‘traditional’ Mormon framework.
2. A reading of “Story of Your Life”, by Ted Chiang alongside Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five to consider time and the nature of God.
3. An analysis of Jane Austen’s Persuasion which explores class and social divides in relation to marriage, suggesting that one possible Mormon parallel is interfaith marriages (this happens to be the first piece of literary criticism I wrote during my undergrad at BYU).
4. A reading of Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell that considers relationships and eternity and time and the ways that they intersect and interact with another, perhaps grounded in the teaching in the Doctrine and Covenants that “that same sociality which exists among us here will exist among us there, only it will be coupled with eternal glory” (D&C 130:2).
5. An analysis of Lloyd Alexander’s Westmark trilogy that focuses on the limitations and realities of the 12^th Article of Faith, considering the injunction for “moderation in all things”, and perhaps a reading alongside the story of Alma the Younger and the Sons of Mosiah that pays close attention to the realities of redemption.

These are just a taste of the types of readings that this expansive Mormon literary criticism makes possible.          

An expansive Mormon literary criticism can draw on Mormonism in the most broadly conceived sense—Mormon scriptural texts, theological ideas and principles, doctrines, practices, cultural elements; drawn from mainstream, fundamentalist, or from any other expression of Mormonism.  While I have focused on the value of this approach to include literature that falls outside the ‘Mormon literature’ umbrella, we can, and should!, practice this sort of literary criticism with explicitly Mormon texts as well. I believe that a Mormon literary criticism that does what I’ve sketched out today—that pays attention to what texts “unfurl, fall forth, and make possible’, that likens all the best books unto ourselves, that remains faithful to a Mormon ethos and open and generous to the stranger—can transform Mormonism. And us along with it.