Swift Hall 101
1025 E. 58th St.
Chicago, IL 60637

Tel: (773) 702-8221
Fax: (773) 702-8223
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Richard A. Rosengarten

Dean and Associate Professor of Religion and Literature in the Divinity School

M.A., Ph.D. (University of Chicago)

Richard Rosengarten works in religion and literature, where he pursues interests in genres of narrative (especially the novel), in hermeneutics, literary theory, and aesthetics, and in the development of religious thought through the “long” eighteenth century. His book Henry Fielding and the Narration of Providence: Divine Design and the Incursions of Evil offers a revision to the standard argument that the advent of the novel in England was an extension of Puritan theology and the conversion narrative: locating Fielding specifically in the contexts of the debates about poetic justice in the drama, and the deism controversy’s discussions of natural religion, he argues that the eighteenth-century English novel engages broader theological questions about the security of classic notions of providential intervention in a post-Newtonian universe. He is completing a book on Flannery O’Connor’s fiction under the title The Catholic Sophocles, and plans to undertake a study of satire as a mode of apophatic language from Rabelais to Swift.

"The Catholic Sophocles: Violence and Vision in Flannery O'Connor's 'Revelation'," Religion and Culture Web Forum, November 2003