Spiritual revival: The popular sublime in Pat Mora, Demetria Martinez and Denise Chavez

This study examines three Chicana writers' works that are deeply involved in articulating spiritual discourse. Based on the premise that these writers are proposing a spiritual revival by way of discovering sublime experiences, the study shows how these authors represent the various roles of religion as paths to discover their feminine subjectivity and reencounter their identity.As its point of departure, this dissertation engages in an overarching review of both historical and contemporary theories of the sublime to clarify the term and appropriate them for the purpose of this study. Being the coupling of the concept of the 'popular' from the popular religiosity with that of the sublime, the popular sublime becomes a religiosity that the authors endeavor to propose as an alternative to patriarchal and oppressive religion. The popular sublime is re-conceptualized in the framework of the communal, the spiritual, and the unrepresentable. The project purports to show the popular sublime as a desired religiosity that transcends the ordinary registers of ethical values suggested in the works and leads one to the pragmatic and metaphysical encounter with the self, the other, and society.Each chapter deals with Pat Mora's House of Houses, Demetria Martinez's Mother Tongue, and Denise Chavez's Face of an Angel. The study delves into concepts such as eternal home, solidarity, and service, whose meaning are reappropriated by reassessing sensory and affective significances especially in women's lives. Throughout this process, the study reflects the complexly multifarious dialectics among religion, feminism, ethics, and humanism.