On the afternoon of Friday 2nd October 2009 at the Graham Greene International Festival Fr. Mark Bosco, S.J., gave a most thoughtful conference paper on “Greene: Catholic Literary Modernist”, and drew stimulating questions from his attentive audience.
He argued that Catholicism had been a minority tradition in England until Cardinal John Newman and the re-establishment, which provided opportunities --- though they had enemies to the left and right --- for English intellectuals and converts, such as Chesterton, Knox and Sitwell, and such as Greene and Waugh, for Catholicism offered a way to be Modern. In The End of the Affair Greene offered a vision of the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God in his most persistently theological novel.
Fr. Bosco teaches in the Departments of English and Theology and is Director of Catholic Studies at Loyola University, Chicago. He is reputed to be the most eminent scholar of Greene in the USA, and he is the author of Graham Greene’s Catholic Imagination (2005).
Much has been written about Graham Greene's relationship to his Catholic faith and its privileged place within his texts. Greene's early books are usually described as "Catholic Novels", for he not only uses Catholic belief to frame the issues of modernity, but he also offers Catholicism's vision and doctrine as a remedy to the present crisis in Western civilization. Greene's later work, by contrast, is generally regarded as falling into political and detective genres. In his book Mark Bosco argues that this is a false dichotomy created by a narrowly prescriptive understanding of the Catholic genre and obscures the impact of Greene's developing religious imagination on his literary art. In his review of Mark's text Albert Gelpi, Emeritus Professor of English, Stanford University (California), commented that his argument became "utterly convincing" because of "his richly nuanced reading of the novels".
Mark Bosco also wrote the introduction to the edition of The Honorary Consul for the Penguin Classics series in 2008.
He argued that Catholicism had been a minority tradition in England until Cardinal John Newman and the re-establishment, which provided opportunities --- though they had enemies to the left and right --- for English intellectuals and converts, such as Chesterton, Knox and Sitwell, and such as Greene and Waugh, for Catholicism offered a way to be Modern. In The End of the Affair Greene offered a vision of the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God in his most persistently theological novel.
Fr. Bosco teaches in the Departments of English and Theology and is Director of Catholic Studies at Loyola University, Chicago. He is reputed to be the most eminent scholar of Greene in the USA, and he is the author of Graham Greene’s Catholic Imagination (2005).
Much has been written about Graham Greene's relationship to his Catholic faith and its privileged place within his texts. Greene's early books are usually described as "Catholic Novels", for he not only uses Catholic belief to frame the issues of modernity, but he also offers Catholicism's vision and doctrine as a remedy to the present crisis in Western civilization. Greene's later work, by contrast, is generally regarded as falling into political and detective genres. In his book Mark Bosco argues that this is a false dichotomy created by a narrowly prescriptive understanding of the Catholic genre and obscures the impact of Greene's developing religious imagination on his literary art. In his review of Mark's text Albert Gelpi, Emeritus Professor of English, Stanford University (California), commented that his argument became "utterly convincing" because of "his richly nuanced reading of the novels".
Mark Bosco also wrote the introduction to the edition of The Honorary Consul for the Penguin Classics series in 2008.
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