At the Graham Greene International Festival on Friday 1st October 2010 at 2.15pm in the Town Hall, Berkhamsted (Hertfordshire, UK), Dr. Frances McCormack (National University of Ireland, Galway) (pictured in the top photograph) will discuss aspects of medieval theology, as she discovers them in one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers in the English language.
Her title is “Nothing but a regret: compunction and shame in the Catholic novels of Graham Greene”.
She will explain the medieval theological doctrine of compunction, which was a monastic doctrine of a sorrow and regret which would bring one closer to God. According to the theological writers of the time, it had four sources: (i) awareness of one's own sins, (ii) contemplation of heaven, (iii) fear of damnation, and (iv) sorrow for the sins of others. She will argue that this doctrine informs Greene's Catholic writings, motivating his characters to the sense of regret and shame which they so often feel. She will examine this compunction as a motivational force in the lives of both protagonists and antagonists in the Catholic novels.
Dr. McCormack is a Lecturer in the Department of English at the National University of Ireland, Galway. She is the author of Chaucer and the Culture of Dissent (2007), and she was the lexicographical consultant for Terence Patrick Dolan’s Dictionary of Hiberno-English (2nd ed.). In addition to her enthusiasm for Chaucer, her research interests include Old and Middle English literature, political, religious and devotional literature of those eras, mystical writing, anticlericalism, penitential writings and heresy.
Her title is “Nothing but a regret: compunction and shame in the Catholic novels of Graham Greene”.
She will explain the medieval theological doctrine of compunction, which was a monastic doctrine of a sorrow and regret which would bring one closer to God. According to the theological writers of the time, it had four sources: (i) awareness of one's own sins, (ii) contemplation of heaven, (iii) fear of damnation, and (iv) sorrow for the sins of others. She will argue that this doctrine informs Greene's Catholic writings, motivating his characters to the sense of regret and shame which they so often feel. She will examine this compunction as a motivational force in the lives of both protagonists and antagonists in the Catholic novels.
Dr. McCormack is a Lecturer in the Department of English at the National University of Ireland, Galway. She is the author of Chaucer and the Culture of Dissent (2007), and she was the lexicographical consultant for Terence Patrick Dolan’s Dictionary of Hiberno-English (2nd ed.). In addition to her enthusiasm for Chaucer, her research interests include Old and Middle English literature, political, religious and devotional literature of those eras, mystical writing, anticlericalism, penitential writings and heresy.
At the Festival on the afternoon of Saturday 2nd October 2010 in Deans’ Hall, Berkhamsted School (UK), Monica Ali (photographed by John Follain, above) will speak about “My Writing and Graham Greene”. She wrote the introduction to one of Greene’s great Catholic novels, The End of the Affair, in Vintage’s centenary edition, 2004. She is the author of Brick Lane amongst other texts, and she has lectured at Columbia University, New York.
On 7th October 2010 Vintage Classics will release a new edition of Greene’s most famous Catholic novel, The Power and the Glory (1940), and the volume will be enhanced by notes for reading groups.
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