ENGL 375
Against Scripture Spring 2025
Division I

It is commonly observed that Jews, Christians, and Muslims are “People of the Book.” Whatever their differences, the three monotheisms offer an emphatically literary, textual version of religion. And yet, each of these religions has produced counter-movements that question the authority of Scripture, urging less scribal understandings of God and morality. For these movements, the Holy Book is a misguided attempt to fix moral life in a written catalog of rules. But then if you question the authority of writing, how do you write? How do you write in a way that will convince your readers to question writing, including, one assumes, your own? In this course, we will examine literary and writerly authority, as well as resistance to it. We will begin with early modern writing, exploring Protestant anti-scriptualists and spiritualists, then move backward to their medieval predecessors. From there, we will proceed to Sufis and other Muslims beyond-the-law, Jewish philosophers who think reading undoes law, and the anti-legalism of critical theory. We will focus on texts that don’t just make arguments about distrusting texts, but also devise techniques for stripping authority from Holy Writ. Along the way, we will keep a list of techniques for weaning textual authority, pulling from the Torah, the Quran, the Bible, the US Constitution. How can you write without claiming authority for your own words? How can any writing renounce its role as arbiter in favor of the reader’s freedom?