Tarrying with the transcendent: Forms of religious experience in twentieth-century literature.

摘要

My dissertation considers whether the postmodern become the postsecular. Slavoj Zizek and Alain Badiou have posed this question as they have challenged postmodern skepticism, yet Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida also in some sense map a religious countercurrent in contemporary intellectual life. I develop a literary and theoretical genealogy of the turn towards the transcendent through a series of interrelated readings that examine key works by the modernists E. M. Forster, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, and by the contemporary writer, J. M. Coetzee.; My first chapter starts with Lionel Trilling's famous claim that Forster's literature is characterized by a "double turn," an ironizing device that produces skepticism in the face of religious belief. In a close reading of A Passage to India (1924), I argue, however, that Forster's "double turn" has the effect of undercutting not only affirmations of faith, but also---and more importantly---those of doubt.; In chapter two I challenge the standard critical account of Eliot that divides his career into two distinct and unconnected halves pre- and post-conversion. Focusing on Four Quartets, I demonstrate that Eliot recycles many of his key images, motifs, and devices in order to recast how his earlier work engages with dialectics of faith and doubt, a dialogue still central to the goals and techniques of modernism.; Chapter three takes up Joyce's Ulysses. Scholars have long recognized the debt that Joyce owes to The Divine Comedy, yet little attention is focused on the principal structuring device of Dante's poem: the sensus plenior (Latin, "fuller sense"). My chapter establishes that Dante's fourfold structure is one of the central organizing principles of Ulysses and explores how Joyce uses this device to move beyond a purely materialist account of reality.; In chapter four I turn my attention to J. M. Coetzee, a contemporary South African writer keenly aware of the modernist preoccupation with the transcendent. Fascinatingly, in his recent Elizabeth Costello (2003) Coetzee specifically refers to the foregoing texts I have analyzed in this dissertation, using the iconographic modernists (along with Kafka) to challenge a largely secularized account of twentieth-century literature and culture.