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European culture after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 was no stranger to ancient beliefs in an organic, religiously sanctioned, and aesthetically pleasing relationship to the land. The many resonances of this relationship form a more or less coherent whole, in which the supposed cosmopolitanism of the modern age is belied by a deep commitment to regional, nationalist, and civilizational attachments, including a justifying theological armature, much of which is still with us today. This volume untangles the meaning of the vital geographies of the period, including how they shaped its literature and intellectual life.
Religion is an undiscovered country for much of the secular
academy, which remains deeply ambivalent about it as an object of
study. On the one hand, secular scholars agree that it is time to
take religion seriously. On the other, these same scholars persist
in assuming that religion rests not on belief but on power and
ideology. According to Vincent Pecora, the idea of the secular
itself is the source of much of the contradiction and confusion in
contemporary thought about religion. Pecora aims here to work
through the paradoxes of secularization, which emerges in this book
as an intractable problem for cultural criticism in the
nation-states of the post-Enlightenment West.
In Secularization without End: Beckett, Mann, Coetzee, Vincent P. Pecora elaborates an alternative history of the twentieth-century Western novel that explains the resurgence of Christian theological ideas. Standard accounts of secularization in the novel assume the gradual disappearance of religious themes through processes typically described as rationalization: philosophy and science replace faith. Pecora shows, however, that in the modern novels he examines, "secularization" ceases to mean emancipation from the prescientific ignorance or enchantment commonly associated with belief and signifies instead the shameful state of a humanity bereft of grace and undeserving of redemption. His book focuses on the unpredictable and paradoxical rediscovery of theological perspectives in otherwise secular novels after 1945. The narratives he analyzes are all seemingly godless in their overt points of view, from Samuel Beckett's Murphy to Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus to J. M. Coetzee's The Childhood of Jesus. But, Pecora argues, these novels wind up producing varieties of religious doctrine drawn from Augustinian and Calvinist claims about primordial guilt and the impotence of human will. In the most artfully imaginative ways possible, Beckett, Mann, and Coetzee resist the apparently inevitable plot that so many others have constructed for the history of the novel, by which human existence is reduced to mundane and meaningless routines and nothing more. Instead, their writing invokes a religious past that turns secular modernity, and the novel itself, inside out.
Religion is an undiscovered country for much of the secular
academy, which remains deeply ambivalent about it as an object of
study. On the one hand, secular scholars agree that it is time to
take religion seriously. On the other, these same scholars persist
in assuming that religion rests not on belief but on power and
ideology. According to Vincent Pecora, the idea of the secular
itself is the source of much of the contradiction and confusion in
contemporary thought about religion. Pecora aims here to work
through the paradoxes of secularization, which emerges in this book
as an intractable problem for cultural criticism in the
nation-states of the post-Enlightenment West.
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