eBook

Partial Faiths

John A. McClure

2010,2007

Overview

Spiritual conversions figure heavily in such novels as Thomas Pynchon's Vineland, Toni Morrison's Paradise, and Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine. What connects such varied works is that their convert-characters are disenchanted with secularism yet apprehensive of dogmatic religiosity. Partial Faiths is the first study to identify a body of contemporary fiction in such terms, take the measure of its structures and strategies, and evaluate its contribution to public discourse on religion's place in postmodern life. Postsecularism is most often associated with philosophers and theorists such as Jacques Derrida, Richard Rorty, Charles Taylor, William Connolly, Jürgen Habermas, and Gianni Vattimo. But it is also being explored and invented, says John A. McClure, by many novelists: Leslie Marmon Silko, Don DeLillo, Michael Ondaatje, and N. Scott Momaday among others. These novelists, who are often regarded as belonging to different domains of contemporary fiction, are fleshing out the postsecular issues that scholars treat more abstractly. But the modes of belief elaborated in these novels and the new narrative forms synchronized with these modes are dramatically partial and open-ended. Postsecular fiction does not aspire to any full \"mapping\" of the reenchanted cosmos or any formal moral code, nor does it promise anything like full redemption. It is partial in another sense as well: it is emphatically dedicated to progressive ideals of social transformation and well-being, in repudiation of resurgent fundamentalist prescriptions for the same.

• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Subject: 20th century / 21st century / American / American fiction / American fiction -- 20th century -- History and criticism -- Theory, etc / American fiction -- 21st century -- History and criticism -- Theory, etc / History / History and criticism / Language & Literature / LITERARY CRITICISM / Religion and literature / Religion and literature -- United States -- History -- 20th century / Religion and literature -- United States -- History -- 21st century / Religion in literature / Secularism in literature / Theory, etc / United States
• ISBN: 9780820330327, 0820330329, 9780820330334, 0820330337, 9780820336602, 0820336602