Interview with Mark Eaton
Editor-elect, Christianity & Literature
Can you point to a particular intellectual discovery or work of literature that ignited your interest in the intersection of Christianity and literature?
Like a lot of people who end up becoming professors, I was an avid reader growing up, so my interest in the intersection of Christianity and literature in one sense goes way back. But I do remember a period right around the time when I was finishing graduate school and starting my first job that I became more serious about researching and writing about it. Looking back at this period, I think I also wanted to understand my own upbringing better. In any case, I had read several novels that represented Christianity in compelling ways. For instance, James Baldwin’s semi-autobiographical novel Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953) portrays his protagonist John Grimes’ conversion during an all-night “tarry” service in a storefront Pentecostal Church in Harlem, and I was struck by how vivid and even visceral those passages in the book were. Baldwin was using fictional techniques he learned from Henry James, third person limited omniscience in particular, to render religious experience. I recall, too, reading Don DeLillo’s masterpiece White Noise (1985) around this same time and being struck by that novel’s satirical yet somehow also sympathetic treatment of what Robert Wuthnow diagnosed as a cultural shift from religious belonging to spiritual seeking. Finally, I read Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible (1998) practically in one sitting. Despite a scathing critique of misguided missionaries in the Congo on the eve of revolution, the novel is a kind of elegy for a world in which the Bible was a form of shared knowledge and a language that shaped the way the Price family understood their experiences in Africa. Reading these novels prompted me to think more deeply about how fiction can represent Christian faith and practice in powerfully experiential as well as historically informed ways.
Is there an experience from your past or an aspect of your training that you now see as a starting point for the variety of interests have led you to the editorship of a scholarly journal?
Well, come to think of it, I was the inaugural editor of an undergraduate literary journal in college. In graduate school, my mentor was the editor of The Faulkner Journal at the time, so I had some early exposure to what editing a scholarly journal entails. But the major experiences that brought me to this point, I suppose, include the articles that I’ve published in various scholarly journals (such as American Literary History and Modern Fiction Studies, among others), as well as my longstanding commitment to keeping up with journals in my field. I came of age as a scholar at a time when an article in Critical Inquiry could still be regarded as a must read. When the opportunity came along to become editor of Christianity & Literature, it seemed like a perfect moment in my career to take on this important role. I see this as a calling of sorts, a form of professional service to an organization that has been important to me. In fact, my first publication was in Christianity & Literature (an essay on George Herbert from a graduate seminar). I guess I see this as a way of “paying it forward.”
What strengths from C&L’s past do you seek to build on? What new directions might you hope to take with journal?
Paul Contino and Maire Mullins have done an extraordinary job as editors for many years. It’s an immense honor and a privilege to follow in their footsteps—they are big shoes to fill! One of the journal’s strengths that I hope to continue is pulling out special issues on certain authors, topics, or themes. In recent years, the journal has had excellent special issues on Flannery O’Connor, for instance, and more recently, Christianity and Contemporary Fiction, which was billed as a response to Paul Elie’s provocative essay “Has Fiction Lost its Faith?” Paul Contino managed to get Paul Elie himself to give a response to the essays in that issue. I’d like to continue this sort of engagement with important discussions currently animating literary studies. What contribution can Christianity & Literature make to these discussions? I can already envision any number of special issues on, say, the Protestant Reformation and Literature (tied to the 500th anniversary of its symbolic beginning in 1517), or Christianity and Romanticism (perhaps guest edited by Colin Jager at Rutgers or Josh King at Baylor). There has been a lot of important revisionist work on Shakespeare and religion, not least by former CCL President John Cox at Hope College, and C&L can surely step into that arena.
Or what about an issue on Christian bestsellers? I’m thinking here of Charles M. Sheldon’s In His Steps (1896), which ranks as one of the best-selling novels of all time at 30 million copies, or the Left Behind series (1996-2007), which has sold more than 65 million copies. I’m excited to work with two very promising young scholars, Matt Smith and Caleb Spencer, who will be serving as Associate Editors, to come up with ideas about how the journal can make important contributions. One thing we will have an opportunity to do is appoint new members to the editorial board, which has some very august names on it, but many of them are well beyond retirement age. As we enter into a partnership with SAGE, my hope is that I can shepherd C&L into the digital age, reaching a larger and more international audience than ever before through institutional subscriptions to the bundled database of journals. Electronic availability will help researchers find articles in C&L on a variety of subjects, which will ultimately make the journal more viable in the new world of digital humanities. Online journals such as Common-place and The Journal of Transnational American Studies (JTAS) are at the leading edge of what seems to me a paradigm shift in scholarly publishing. Even the staid New Yorker is getting in on the act with its daily dispatches sent out by email. When Hilary Clinton announced her candidacy recently, they ran a selection of stories from The New Yorker’s archive dating back to 1994. Something like this could be done on the CCL website: re-print past articles that are now digitized, or post a weekly poem, or put book reviews up in a more blog-like format, and open it up for comments, as Books & Culture and many other journals now do. Dan Ritchie, who has been editing the Christ-Lit email listserve, believes this could be a way of spurring higher-level discussions and making our site a place that people interested in Christianity and literary scholarship feel they want to visit.
Can you reflect on what you take the importance of CCL to be?
My involvement with the Conference on Christianity and Literature has been important in different ways at different stages in my career. I first began attending CCL luncheons at the Modern Language Association’s annual convention while in graduate school; indeed, I think it was the first year I went on the job market. One memorable occasion was at a luncheon in San Francisco when I first met Chris Noble, now a colleague and friend. Czeslaw Milosz (affiliated with UC Berkeley at the time) was being honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award that year and was present at the luncheon, as I recall, or was it Rene Girard? Either way, pretty heady stuff for a graduate student. CCL was a professional organization that clearly took its mission seriously, and it helped young academics just starting out to expand their contacts beyond graduate advisors. Later on, of course, I became involved in the organization more formally by serving on the Book of the Year Prize Committee (twice) and then as Secretary (twice). By that point, I realized that the organization had played no small part in helping me build up a network of professional contacts from Christian colleges and universities nationwide.
What area or period of literature do you particularly enjoy studying and teaching?
I’ve enjoyed teaching and writing about contemporary fiction in recent years. I’ve taught seminars on religion and American literature both at APU and at Claremont Graduate University. Each time, I change up the reading list, though certain writers are almost always included, if not always the same works. Flannery O’Connor, James Baldwin, Philip Roth, John Updike, Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy, and Marilynne Robinson are among the writers I keep coming back to, but there are many others in rotation, such as J.D. Salinger, Chaim Potok, Rudolfo Anaya, Sandra Cisneros, Ernest Gaines, Alice McDermott, and so on. I also enjoy teaching a course on contemporary British fiction, in which every novel on my syllabus has been published since 2000, including Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, Ian McEwan’s Atonement, David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, and Zoe Heller’s The Believers, to name a few. One downside to teaching contemporary fiction is that there’s too much to keep up with. But I should end by saying that my teaching varies quite a bit: I’m teaching American Gothic this fall, and I regularly teach film studies courses on the New Hollywood and Alfred Hitchcock.
To supplement what you have said about your professional activities and goals, can you tell us a bit about your life beyond and apart from your vocation as a teacher and scholar?
I tend to view my personal and professional endeavors somewhat holistically, all of a piece. That said I do have a number of hobbies and interests. I’ve been a runner since junior high, for instance, and I continue to run regularly, although one problem with starting out as a relatively fast runner is that nothing slows you down so much as aging. I frequently run with my wife Victoria in the morning on dirt trails in the Arroyo Seco near South Pasadena. It’s a great way to start the day and also makes my café latte taste that much better. I still read newspapers—in print, not online—virtually every day, especially The New York Times. Also, I love sports: track and field in particular, but also basketball, golf, tennis, and soccer. I’m a fan of Chelsea in the Premier League, which many soccer fans dislike because of their overpaid roster and petulant coach, but I once saw a match at its stadium, Stamford Bridge, and I’ve been hooked ever since. I’d have to say that one of my favorite things to do is read, however, and my single favorite publication is undoubtedly The New York Review of Books.
