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Abstract: This essay considers the fiction of James Purdy from the point of view of his self-proclaimed Christian vision, which embraces each individual as sacred through empathic understanding, eschewing objective judgment based on abstract absolutes. The essay argues that Purdy’s contrarian fiction can be understood revealingly in relation to the negative theology of Pseudo-Dionysius and Nicholas of Cusa, which envisioned a subjective, perspectival, and creatively participatory ontology that anticipated the relational and contextual paradigm of the real posited by quantum physics. Refusing reification, Purdy’s fiction vigorously negates sociopolitical idols of the self in favor of the individual’s ultimate, infinite mystery.
Don Adams (Fri,) studied this question.
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