The Subject of Belief: Modernism, Religion, and Literature

The Subject of Belief Modernism, Religion, and Literature examines what has become a critical truism in twentieth-century studies: because modern and contemporary literature was written in the aftermath of the Nietzschean death of God, all serious writing in modernity has been presumed to be secular, reflecting the decline of religious belief in public and private. Yet, the persistence of religion in Western culture has produced in the last ten years a turn to post-skeptical or postsecular thinking, the interrogation of religion's continued meaning in the wake of Enlightenment critique. Drawing on the postsecular writings of such theorists as Slavoj Zizek, Alain Badiou, and Jacques Derrida, as well as the scholarship of Charles Taylor, Pericles Lewis, and Gauri Viswanathan, The Subject of Belief challenges this predominantly Nietzschean reading of twentieth-century literature to argue for modernism as the originating source of the postsecular. Both Zizek and Badiou have adapted theological concepts like conversion and epiphany for an ethically engaged politics, while Derrida has argued for an innovative ambiguity in the religious call of revelation. 1 demonstrate that these innovations were already present in James Joyce's concept of epiphany and T.S. Eliot's exploration of poetic subjectivity in religious conversion; these authors modified religious structures to preserve forms of transcendence that contemporary critics have critically forgotten or ignored.;In so doing, modernist writers re-imagined both the self and its relation to society, constructing a "subject of belief," or a believing subject, that questioned immanent and materialist notions of subjectivity. These modernist forms of transcendence reach forward in time and have shaped, often in unacknowledged ways, concepts of meaning and significance in the literature of a militantly anti-religious writer like Ian McEwan and of more ambiguously post-secular writers like J. M. Coetzee. By tracing the arc of transcendence through these four writers, The Subject of Belief argues not only that twentieth-century literature is far less secular than we have understood, but also that by encoding transcendent meaning into literary forms like epiphany and parataxis, modernist writers subtly inaugurated a formal tradition that has produced a religious resonance throughout contemporary literature.