Description
Book SynopsisThis state of the art collection offers fresh perspectives on why intersections between literature, religion, and ethics can address the fault lines of modernity and are not necessarily the cause of modernity's faults.' From a diverse cohort of scholars from around the world, with appointments in comparative literature and other disciplines, the essays suggest that the imagined hegemony of a Judeo-Christian Western project is neither exclusively true nor productive. However, the essays also suggest that elements of the Western religious traditions are important vectors for understanding modernity's complicated relationship to the past.
Trade ReviewThe project undertaken in
Fault Lines of Modernity: The Fractures and Repairs of Religion, Ethics, and Literature is, by nature of its subject, large, complex, and at times contradictory. It is also fascinating, compelling, and thought provoking. * Recherche Littéraire *
This thoughtful collection of essays raises important questions about the role of literature and religion in today's fractured world, inviting us to rethink the boundaries that have been constructed between religion, ethics and literature and to broaden our vision beyond the traditions of Western culture. * Susan Bassnett, Professor Emerita of Comparative Literature, University of Warwick, UK, and Professor of Comparative Literature, University of Glasgow, UK *
Against prevailing trends,
Fault Lines of Modernity shows the power of reading great literature to engage urgent ethical and religious problems. From mystery fiction to mysticism, the works examined here provide sites of transcendence that expose modern divisions and ways to overcome them. * Brian Britt, Professor of Religion and Culture, Virginia Tech, USA *
What does it mean to study literature in our time of crisis? What
could or
should it mean? A shared commitment to critical self-awareness and reflection on the grounds and aims of literary study unifies the diversity of perspectives represented here, which take a distinctive approach to famous (or infamous) disputes regarding literature’s ambitions. The contested boundaries among literature, religion, and ethics serve as the starting point; the essays navigate these boundaries, and the tensions between assumptions of universality, on the one hand, and the rights of the marginalized and the irreducibly particular, on the other. The journeys through this fraught terrain draw our attention back to what has always been at stake: the complexity of human needs in times of cultural crisis, and literature’s potential role in their redemption. * Susan McReynolds, Associate Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Northwestern University, USA *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction
Kitty Millet (San Francisco State University, USA) I. The Transcendental and Transcendence 1. Rewriting Grand Narratives as a Supratemporal Mystical Competition: Illustrations from Dante, Rabelais, Cervantes, Goethe, Proust, Mann, and Joyce
Gerald Gillespie (Stanford University, USA) 2. "Clearer Awareness of the … Crisis": Erich Auerbach’s Radical Relativism and the "Rich Tensions" of the Historical Imperative
Geoffrey Green (San Francisco State University, USA) 3. Secularism and Post-Secularism
Wlad Godzich (University of California at Santa Cruz, USA) II. Literature 4. Redemptive Readings between Maurice Blanchot and Franz Rosenzweig
Shawna Vesco (University of California at Santa Cruz, USA) 5. “So What If You Are Big?”: Divisive Identities and the Ethics of Pluralism in Medieval Indian Literatures of Devotion
Ipshita Chanda (Jadavpur University, India, and Georgetown University, USA) 6. Alterity and the Ethics of the Novel in J. M. Coetzee's Quasi-Realism
Christopher Weinberger (San Francisco State University, USA) III. Religion 7. Asmodeus, the “Eye of Providence,” and the Ethics of Seeing in 19th-Century Mystery Fiction
Sara Hackenberg (San Francisco State University, USA) 8. Modernism’s Religious Rhetorics: Or, What Bothered Baudelaire
Hope Hodgkins (University of North Carolina, Greensboro, USA) 9. Poetry and Religion: Approaches to Christian Transcendence in Late 20th-Century Poets
Stephanie Heimgartner (Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany) IV. Ethics 10. Instituting the Other: Ethical Fault Lines in Readings and Pedagogies of Alterity
Dorothy Figueira (University of Georgia, USA) 11. Thinking God on the Basis of Ethics: Levinas,
The Brothers Karamazov, and Dostoevsky’s Anti-Semitism
Steven Shankman (University of Oregon, USA) 12. An Ethics for Missing Persons
Kitty Millet (San Francisco State University, USA) Index
