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Paul Maltby. The Visionary Moment: A Postmodern Critique. Albany: State U of New York P, 1992. 176 pp.
"An old theory of truth still enchants us," Paul Maltby says at the outset of his new book, though it certainly does not seem to enchant him (1). This theory, which Maltby calls "insidious," "politically suspect," and "epistemologically unsound," is that "truth, in the sense of a 'higher' spiritual knowledge, can be apprehended in an illuminating instant" (9, 3, 1). What Maltby calls "visionary moments" are distinguished by their sudden appearance and their precarious brevity; they signify that "a spiritual rebirth either has occurred or will occur" and is "often validated in the name of a transcendent power or force" (16). They have been with us, Maltby tells us, in some form or another, at least since that great and dubious light shone on Paul as he made his way to Damascus, and Maltby traces this tradition as it moves through Western literature, from John Bunyon's Grace Abounding through Wordsworth's "spots of time," to the epiphanies of Joyce and Heidegger's analysis of aletheia in Being and Time. Because Maltby's interest is primarily in writers...