In my rodeo-roundup of library books today to fuel the completion of my introductory chapter on (Augustine, Kenneth Burke, sermons in American novels, Greek and Roman rhetoric, and postmodernism) a bunch of stuff, I came across this gem of a book from 2007:
Partial Faiths: Postsecular Fiction in the Age of Pynchon and Morrison, by John A. McClure.
Is it is the most promising academic treatment of some of my subject matter since The Rites of Identity (which marries the work of Ralph Ellison with the theory of Kenneth Burke). After a cursory and breathless read of the introduction, I am excited about McClure's use of and constant redefinition of postsecularism. Here are some sharp excerpts:
"These novelists [Morrison, Erdrich, and DeLillo, to name a few], whom critics often relegate to separate domains within conemporary fiction, are all thinking in the narrative mode about postsecular movements and possibilities that the theorists and sociologists treat more abstractly. All of them tell stories about new forms of religiously inflected seeing and being. And in each case, the forms of faith they invent, study, and affirm are dramatically partial and open-ended. Tey do not provide, or even aspire to provide, any full "mapping" of the reenchanged cosmos. They do not promise anything like full redemption" (ix).
And . . .
"Certain features are constant across the field of postsecular texts. The partial conversions of postsecular fiction do not deliver those who experience them from worldliness into well-ordered systems of religious belief. Instead, they tend to strand those who experience tem in the ideologically mixed and confusing middle zones of the conventional conversion narrative, zones through which the conventional protagonist passes with all possible haste, on his way to a domain of secure religious dwelling. And yet the postsecular characters depoisted in thse zones do not seem particularly uncomfortable there nor particularly impatient to move on to some more fully elaborated form of belief and practice. In a similar manner, the break with secular versions of the real does not lead the postsecular narrative to the triumphant reapprearce of well-mapped, familiar, religious cosmos, as it often does in conventional narratives of conversion . . . One does not sense, in spite of the dramatic instability of the worlds thus defined, that either the novelists or their characters are anxious to 'straighten things out.'" (4).
And finally . . .
"I want to sketch out a map of the broader postsecular movements with which [postsecular fiction] is engaged. These movements -- including the explosve growth of fundamentalism and the pneumatic forms of organized religious practice, 'New Age' experiments in alternative spiritualities, and the turn toward religion in certain philosophical circles -- all reflect a strong but selective disenchantment with secular values and modes of being and a determination to invent alternatives. The novelists whose work I explore share this disenchantment and determination: they seek at once to evaluate the culturally dominant modes of postsecular innovation and to develop their own religiously inflected alternatives to secularism. With what specific practical and theoretical projects, then, are contemporary postecular novelists in conversation?" (7).
What projects, indeed. How about a rebuilding of the ethos and formalized structure of the Christian sermon to create newly charged postsecular sermons that continue the tendency of American novels toward the "sermonic urge", evident in the fiction of Ellison, Updike, Morrison, Erdrich, and McCarthy? Thank you, Mr. McClure.
By the way, you know you're an egg-headed geek when language like this has the effect on you that Indiana Jones did, when you were a kid. Sheesh.
I am always a little leery of the "posts" movements, as in postfeminist, post civil rights, postmodernist, etc. They seem to indicate that there has been an interruption between the previous movement and the "now" ... when perhaps they are a continuation-with-ensuing-transformation of the previous movement, with strong elements of the "previous" era as underpinnings for contemporary cultures. The Renaissance, for example, still had many features of Feudalism and these did not disappear with the modern era, necessarily. Moreover, I would argue that we are still fighting for civil rights, we are still feeling its reverberations, and we aren't all there yet, where these have truly been materially achieved. But hey that's just me, I think I have OD-ed a little on all this latter day theory as I finish my own dissertation. Still, your dissertation does sound very interesting. Had to do a lot of Burke myself for my master in Communication. He was pretty big at my alma mater. Good luck with your reading! :o)
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