American literature 02DF712 / 2 ECTS / 12h / Évaluation session 1 assidu·es : CC Dispensé·es d’assiduité : ET oral / Évaluation session 2 : ET oral
12h – Claude Le Fustec
As a sociological concept originally defined by Habermas in Between Naturalism and Religion (published in German in 2005), postsecularity refers to a resurgence of the religious in non-institutional forms in post-WW2 secular societies. It is critical of secular constructions of reality while rejecting institutional or dogmatic forms of religiosity. In the field of literature, the term has subsequently been used to describe a feature of contemporary fiction, notably postmodern, by such novelists as Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Charles R. Johnson, Leslie Marmon Silko, Gloria Naylor, Toni Cade Bambara, or Louise Erdrich. Postsecularity participates in the ontological, epistemological and aesthetic questioning of the postmodern era. As John A. McClure has shown in Partial Faiths, Postsecular Fiction in the Age of Pynchon and Morrison (2007), postsecular works invent religiously inflected modes of being that remain partial and open-ended. They dramatize processes of conversion and disrupt secular structures of reality while being at odds with dogmas and fundamentalism. They also articulate the religious with progressive political projects. Their apprehension of religion may take the form of spirituality or of a quest for transcendence.
As Amy Hungerford has suggested in Postmodern Belief. American Literature and Religion since 1960 (2010), American authors are invested in imagining nonsemantic aspects of language in religious terms as can be seen in texts by Allen Ginsberg, James Baldwin, Cormac McCarthy and Don DeLillo. Besides, McClure and Hungerford have shown that postsecular fiction has roots among the Romantics and Modernists and particularly in the transcendentalist thinkers of the early nineteenth century, who resolutely opposed theological dogmas and institutional forms of religion. This course wishes to address the post-secular in contemporary US fiction, which may include popular culture (films and tv series notably).
Selected bibliography
- COALE, Samuel Chase. Paradigms of Paranoia: The Culture of Conspiracy in Contemporary American Fiction. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005.
- CORNILLON, Claire. Par-delà l’Infini. La Spiritualité dans la Science-Fiction française, anglaise et américaine. Université de la Sorbonne nouvelle – Paris III, 2012. (https://tel.archives-ouvertes.fr/tel-00869974)
- FARIS, Wendy B. Ordinary Enchantments, Magical Realism and the Remystification of Narrative. Nashville, Vanderbilt University Press, 2004.
- HUME, Kathryn. American Dream, American Nightmare: Fiction since 1960. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002.
- HUNGERFORD, Amy. Postmodern Belief. American Literature and Religion since 1960. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2010.
- KOSOFSKY SEDGWICK, Eve. “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or You’re so paranoid, You probably think this essay is about you”, in Touching Feeling, Durham: Duke University Press, 2003.
- MCCLURE, John. Partial Faiths. Postsecular Fiction in the Age of Pynchon and Morrison. The University of Georgia Press, 2007.
- TANNER, Tony. Scenes of Nature, Signs of Men. (1987) Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989.