Writing Against the Grain: The Challenge of Modernism in the Autobiographical Writings of Frances Banks—Religious Educator

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on three genres in life writing as described by James Olney (narrative/memory, dialogue, and reverie) in Frances Banks’s writings to establish a composite understanding of her writings as life writing. Banks wrote an autobiography, educational texts, and a book on Western mystics. I include all these writings as part of her life writing. When read together all her writings reveal a person attempting to write herself into a positional response to the encroachment of modern materialism in education during the first half the twentieth. She draws from classical Christian ideas, mysticism and current esoteric spirituality.

KEYWORDS:

• Frances Banks
• modernity
• mysticism

Notes

Garth Mason, “Frances Banks—Mystic and Educator: The Visionary Solipsist,” Alternation: Interdisciplinary Journal for the Study of Arts and Humanities in Southern African 11 (2013): 63.

Plotinus, The Enneads (London, UK: Penguin Classics, 1991), 45, 347 and 365.

Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 17.

Taylor, 1992, 18.

James Olney, Memory and Narrative: The Weave of Life-writing (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago, 1998).

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions (London, UK: Penguin Classics, 1954), 7–11.

Rousseau1954, 7.

James Olney, Metaphors of the Self: The Meaning of Autobiography (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972).

Olney, 1972, 4 and 11.

Olney, 1972, 6.

Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy (London, UK: George Allen and Unwin, 1947), 150, 152, 191, and 484.

Frances Banks, “A Plea for Investigation of the Investigation of the Principles of Religious Education,” Christian Council Study Series 5 (1943): 4.

Russell, 1947, 150, 152, 191,312 and 484.

Olney, 1998, 110.

Banks, 1943, 4.

Website: “The Immanent Frame: Secularism, Religion, and the Public Sphere,” http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2008/09/02/buffered-and-porous-selves/ (accessed 27 February 2016).

Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago, 1994), 3.

Ricoeur, 1994, 4.

Frances Banks, Frontiers of Revelation (London, UK: Parrish Publishers, 1962).

Frances Banks, Four Studies in Mysticism (Lincolnshire, UK: Mysticism Committee of the Churches Fellowship for Psychical and Spiritual Studies, 1967).

Banks, 1962, 7 and 27.

Banks, 1962, 5.

Banks, 1962, 5.

Mason, 2013, 164.

Banks, 1962, 6.

Banks, 1962, 6.

Banks, 1962, 6.

Banks, 1962, 11.

Banks, 1962, 27.

Banks, 1962, 27.

Banks, 1962, 44.

Banks, 1962, 25.

Banks, 1962, 29.

Banks, 1962, 7.

Frances Banks, Educating Towards a Christian Society (London, UK: Church Education Publication, 1943), 28.

Banks, 1962, 17.

Ricoeur, 1994, 2–3.

Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003).

Asad, 2003, 73.

Banks, 1962, 124.

Banks, 1943, 4.

Banks, 1943, 19.

Banks, 1943, 28.

Banks, 1943, 31.

Banks, 1943, 24.

Banks, 1943, 10; Mason, 2013, 175.

Banks, 1943, 46.

Banks, 1943, 52–54; Mason, 2013, 176.

Banks, 1943, 54.

Banks, 1943, 55–56.

Banks, 1943, 57 and 61.

Banks, 1943, 61.

Banks, 1943, 71.

Mason, 2013, 176.

Mason, 2013, 183.

Mason, 2013, 183.

Mason, 2013, 184.

Frances Banks, 1967.

Olney, 1972, 6.

Frances Banks, 1967, 14.

Frances Banks, 1967, 6.

Frances Banks, 1967, 8.

Frances Banks, 1967, 8.

Frances Banks, 1962, 27.

Frances Banks, 1967, 17.

Frances Banks, 1967dies, 23.

Frances Banks, 1967, 24.

Frances Banks, 1967, 27.

Plotinus, 1991, 443.

Frances Banks, 1967, 29.

Frances Banks, 1967, 30.

Frances Banks, 1967, 35.

Frances Banks, 1967, 39.

Frances Banks, 1967, 40.

Frances Banks, 1967, 44–47.

Pierre Teilhard De Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man (London, UK: Collins,1966), 191.

Frances Banks, 1967, 48.

Frances Banks, 1967, 48.

Frances Banks, 1967, 52.

Frances Banks, 1967, 53.

Frances Banks, 1967, 54.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Garth Mason

Garth Mason is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Religious Studies and Arabic, University of South Africa, Pretoria, South Africa. [email protected]