contemporary Mormon writing:5 first, bold treatment of a broadened, more ecumenical subject matter, going well beyond, in time, the warmed over servings of the pioneer past and, in space, beyond the confines of the Wasatch, the newer interest centering as much on the contemporary urban and suburban as on the traditional rural scene, whether in Zion or among the Saints of the diaspora and embracing the cultures encountered in mission fields or on government or military service abroad.6

A second development is the writer's realization that in treating Mormon themes "technique is discovery," Mark Schorer's term for that reconcili ation of form and content that makes the way a thing is said ultimately what is said (189). It is that "coition of words and things" which has its roots,says Roland Barthes, "in the depths of the author's personal and secret mythology" (32).

A third development is a growing body of literary criticism as a necessary accompaniment to the thematic and artistic advance in contemporary Mormon letters with, as corollary, a possible key to a Mormon aesthetic in Karl Keller's dictum that "not art filling a religious purpose, but religion succeeding in an aesthetic way" should be the aim (17). Forty years ago at a Utah Academy "Symposium on Mormon Culture" I ventured that Mormonism was "perfectly capable of its own Christian Century and Commentary" (211). Today, in 1993 A.D., which is to say "After Dialogue," our intellectual hungers are being fed and critical standards set by Dialogue and its fellow travelers, Sunstone, Exponent II, BYU Studies, and