Background
Yarbrough, Stephen Ray was born on June 16, 1950 in Longview, Texas, United States. Son of D. Ray and Ann (Muirhead) Yarbrough.
( In analyzing Jonathan Edwards preaching in eighteenth-c...)
In analyzing Jonathan Edwards preaching in eighteenth-century colonial America, the authors demonstrate how his rhetoric distinguished between conversion and persuasion. The authors delineate the basic tenets of Puritan theology, place Edwards' noted sermons within an historical framework, and show how his psycho-spiritual ideas have had lasting impact on American literary, religious, and intellectual history. This reference provides a critical analysis, speech texts, chronology, and bibliography. Students and teachers of rhetoric, American history, literature, philosophy, and religion will find this in-depth study of an enigmatic great American orator pertinent for various uses. The reference defines Edwards' doctrinal stance on key religious issues of the times, describes his methods of preaching and efforts to convert sinners into saints, and assesses his influence in the eighteenth century and later. The volume covers his life, his youth and education, his revival and role in the Great Awakening of religion in America, his church's rejection and his exile. This scholarly study relates his ideas to complex theological roots in European thought, to Christian and Enlightenment discourses, and it points to the enormous effect that he has had on thinking until the twentieth century. Texts of key sermons dealing with central concepts such as divine light, sinners, and true grace are provided.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0313275823/?tag=2022091-20
(Contemporary debates on literary criticism often assumes ...)
Contemporary debates on literary criticism often assumes that "humanism" and "postmodernism" are irreconcilable and that their respective practitioners are necessarily political, pedagogical and philosophical enemies. In "Deliberate Criticism", Stephen R. Yarbroough challenges this assumption by laying the groundwork for a mode of humanistic criticism appropriate to the post-modern era. One of the chief obstacles to this task, Yarbrough explains, has been the tendency of avowed humanistic activity. Too often they view humanism as having a fixed ideology and methodology. As a result, it is frequently associated with traditional criticism and values. Because Yarbrough views humanism as an attitude toward theory rather than a theory in itself, he argues that is is possible to achieve a humanistic criticism even within a mode as apparently antihumanist as post-modernism. Central to Yarborough's thesis is the idea that the purpose of humanism and humanistic thinking is to nurture the "human capacity to provide alternatives and to deliberate and choose decisively among alternatives within particular circumstances". As such, deliberation becomes the fundamental act of human thinking. Yarborough goes on to argue that if we wish to revitalize criticism as a humanistic exercise of freedom and choice, linear, noncontradictory argument can no longer be the paradigm of critical discourse. To illustrate this view, Yarborough examines the work of important and representative intellectuals from Aristotle to Edward Said, showing why they insist on a humanistic criticism characterized by intllectual openness and balance. Yarbrough also reads critics such as Jacques Derrida and Geoffrey Hartman, who, while appearing to be "antihumanistic", as really demonstrating, in full complexity, the inescapable necessity of humanistic critical values. Ambitious in its historical and intellectual range, "Deliberate Criticsm" re-establishes the intellectual legitimacy and cultural authority of humanistic criticism in the face of various forms of structuralist and poststructuralist criticism.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0820313254/?tag=2022091-20
Yarbrough, Stephen Ray was born on June 16, 1950 in Longview, Texas, United States. Son of D. Ray and Ann (Muirhead) Yarbrough.
Bachelor, Sam Houston State University, 1972; Master of Arts, Pennsylvania State University, State College, 1976; Doctor of Philosophy, Pennsylvania State University, State College, 1982.
Assistant professor, Texas Agricultural and Mechanical U., College Station, 1982-1988; associate professor, Texas Agricultural and Mechanical U., College Station, 1988-1989; Fulbright professor, Aristotle U., Thessaloniki, Greece, 1990; associate professor, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York, 1989-1993; associate professor rhetoric, U. North Carolina, Greensboro, since 1993.
(Contemporary debates on literary criticism often assumes ...)
( In analyzing Jonathan Edwards preaching in eighteenth-c...)
(Book by Yarbrough, Stephen R., Brennan, Stephen C.)
Married Bonnie Louise Thames, June 7, 1977. 1 child, Anna.