[DOWNLOAD] "Postsecularism and a Prophetic Sensibility (Viewpoint Essay)" by Christianity and Literature " eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Postsecularism and a Prophetic Sensibility (Viewpoint Essay)
- Author : Christianity and Literature
- Release Date : January 01, 2009
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,Religion & Spirituality,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 66 KB
Description
Recent fiction signals a shift in orientation with regard to the religious. Many contemporary novels depict the performance of a "turning" in the lives of characters or the introduction of moments of mystery and religious possibility, such as those found in the works of Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo. In other novels, characters who already espouse some religious belief take up secular challenges to religion by reconsidering religious assumptions, toying with the practice of faith, attempting to rebuild religion afresh, or placing an existing tradition alongside other faith systems in a syncretistic articulation of belief. Yann Martel, E. L. Doctorow, Cynthia Ozick, Marilynne Robinson, and Toni Morrison are among the authors engaged in these kinds of activity. John McClure has dubbed this manifestation of the turn to the religious, "the postsecular." Ina 1995 article in Modern Fiction Studies, McClure described the period of "resacralization" in contemporary fiction and theory as a movement toward religious ways of knowing. McClure complicates accounts of the postmodern, like Frederic Jameson's and Jean-Francois Lyotard's, contesting their claim that the postmodern is already secular, and even post-religious. (1) McClure notes, as Linda Hutcheon's account of postmodernity suggests, that the secular strand of the postmodern is rivaled by a different strand, which allows for a different kind of reading than the one privileged by critics who assume secular constructions of the postmodern. He points to the "presencing" (using Homi Bhaba's term) of religious discourses in some postmodern fiction, including Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow and Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo. (2)