Brantley - My Natural Methodism

   My Natural Methodism, reflecting on my participation in Anglo-American studies, integrates memoir and literary scholarship. A child’s formative years define the hiding places of interpretive power, and my intellectual and my spiritual autobiography morph toward reconsidering and extending my seven-volume perspective on an international cultural poetic. During my youth, faith in experience and the experience of faith overlapped, creating a binocular way of seeing that I realize, in retrospect, refreshes my perspective on, as well as prepared me to discover in the first place, a science/religion dialogue of Anglo-American literature. This latest effort to overhear such rich conversation infuses our contemporary norm of scholarly objectivity with the subjective position of the interpreter, highlighting my own early instances of motivating inspiration. As an innovative genre of interpretive inquiry—as a memoir/lit crit conjunction of hybrid vigor—this culminating volume of my scholarly work models personal investment—leading to professional commitment—across disciplines in the liberal arts and sciences.

            In independent and private terms, as well as on the public plane of an academic discourse, I reaffirm a historical and interdisciplinary, and invent an autobiographical, method of close reading. Accordingly, I believe the overall accounting I offer is at least as first-hand and pressing as it is also detached and unbiased. My self-portrait of the critic as a young man embodies what I have cumulatively argued that Charles Lamb meant by calling Wordsworth’s poetry “natural methodism.” Ultimately, my natural methodism and Wordsworth’s alike depended on cross-pollination between British empiricism and trans-Atlantic revivalism, which, in turn, became the empirical/evangelical dialect of British and American literary history. I can compare my version of science versus religion with that of my favorite authors, and vice versa. Readers of this canon may do likewise, first by standing on the scientific, religious, and creative ground of experience, and then by crediting the spiritual as well as natural vision of Romantic to Modern Anglo-America.            

            To that end, I have made sure that the literary contextualizing in my eighth monograph includes informal touches from my newly subjective, as distinct from my usual objective, urgency (just as, through integration or interweaving, the memoir contains literary echoes, and hence acquires a formal tone). What would the payoff be? Beyond the academy, My Natural Methodism illustrates the prevalent human habit, and represents the very humane signature, of interpretive inquiry. This universal penchant can never be fully objective, but also should never be only subjective. Interpretation is not a question of either one or the other of these twinned ideals of investigation but, instead, the use of both at once. Finally, whether as the experience of the interpreter or as a value of interpretation, Both/And is the lesson. From Locke, Wesley, and Edwards, through Wordsworth and Dickinson or George Eliot and Frederick Douglass, to T. S. Eliot and Marianne Moore, science and religion appear to be not so much in conflict as in mutually enriching communion.