| This dissertation examines belief in literary modernism through the overlap between religious and aesthetic experience. The running argument is that in modernity the question of belief or unbelief is less important than the "background" in which that question is contextualized; i.e., the more complex question of what it means to say "I believe (or do not believe) in X." In attempting to answer that question, I offer a challenge to the secularization narrative that is, implicitly or explicitly, behind most thinking about modernist literature. Such readings, by equating modernity with secular unbelief, either ignore or reduce (in the theoretical sense) engagements with new forms of belief in modernist art and aesthetics. Rather than seeing religion and secularity as mutually exclusive viewpoints in modernity---or, conversely, as possibly obtaining some kind of accomodationist relationship---I use Charles Taylor's conception of "cross-pressures" from A Secular Age (2007), along with contemporary discourse surrounding the study of religious experience, as context through which to read modernist literature as a site of what I call dissociated belief: a fragmentary exploration of transcendent experience situated within a secular and skeptical background of understanding, and pressured equally by stances against orthodox religiosity or mystical epistemologies and against totally immanent or rational accounts of being, knowing, and art. As a pair of test cases, I look at the impact of the study of religious experience and Eastern religions on the art and aesthetics of T. S. Eliot and E. M. Forster, focusing on their work from the early to late 1920's. Both Forster and Eliot's lifelong interest in the study of religious experience is taken as context for a reading of their own attention to the dissociated nature of modern belief, and for the problems it presented in their art and aesthetics. The result is new readings of (among other works) The Waste Land and A Passage to India, as well an extended look at two little-read works of criticism: the Clark Lectures that Eliot and Forster delivered back-to-back in 1926-7, producing The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry and Aspects of the Novel, respectively. |
