T homas Merton, the American intellectual turned Trappist monk, recounts in The Seven Storey Mountain that his conversion to Catholicism was triggered by reading an account of a sermon in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, a novel that draws from Joyce’s own departure from the faith. Merton fully recognizes the oddness and paradox of such a reading, but there was something, he thinks, about Joyce’s fidelity to experience that allowed Joyce to transmit the consistency and force of the Catholic faith that then penetrated him as a reader. Merton writes: “There was something eminently satisfying in the thought that these Catholics knew what they believed, and knew what to teach, and all taught the same thing, and taught it with coordination and purpose and great effect. It was this that struck me first of all.”1 In his paradigmatic modernist text, Joyce argues for the truthfulness of art over and against the didacticism of a sermon, and yet, paradoxically, it is his artistic rendition of that sermon that converts a lover of literature and the arts to a life of Christian monasticism. This might be a strange case of novelistic bibliomancy or just a bad reading. At the very least, it signals that reading is far less linear than we ecocritics might hope. I say this because we carefully choose reading lists for our students that are intended as antidotes to environmental indifference, not to mention racism, sexism, or colonialism. And yet, to put it bluntly, we have as yet little evidence to suggest that reading “green” literature correlates to an ecological conversion and, even more importantly, to a reduction in carbon emissions. There is nothing wrong with the hope that reading might change a reader, but moral transformation through reading is indeed a hope, akin to the hope believers have in sacred texts, and not a positivist guarantee that we are what we read.

中文翻译：

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Laudato si'与环境人文主义的后世俗主义

美国知识分子，成为特拉普派和尚的托马斯·默顿（Thomas Merton）在《七层山》中讲述说，他向天主教的conversion依是通过阅读詹姆斯·乔伊斯（James Joyce）的《青年艺术家的画像》（A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man）中的讲道而引起的，该小说取材于乔伊斯（Joyce）的小说。自己背离信仰。默顿完全认识到这种阅读的奇怪和悖论，但他认为，乔伊斯的忠实体验使乔伊斯传递了天主教信仰的一贯性和力量，并随后渗透到他的读者中，这使乔伊斯感到信服。默顿写道：“人们认为这些天主教徒知道他们所相信的东西，知道该教什么，并且所有人都教同一个东西，并且具有协调性，目的性和效果，因此令人感到非常满意。正是这个让我印象深刻。“ 1在乔伊斯的范式现代主义著作中，乔伊斯主张艺术的真实性，而不是布道的教义主义，然而，自相矛盾的是，他对布道的艺术演绎将文学和艺术的爱好者转化为人们的生活。基督教修道院。这可能是新奇的书呆子的奇怪案例，或者只是不好的阅读。至少，这表明阅读的线性度远不如我们生态批评家所希望的。我之所以这样说，是因为我们为学生精心选择了阅读清单，目的是对抗环境冷漠，而不是种族主义，性别歧视或殖民主义。但是，坦率地说，我们还没有证据表明阅读“绿色”文献与生态转化有关，更重要的是与减少碳排放有关。