Blasphemous Modernism
The 20th-Century Word Made Flesh
Seiten
2017
Oxford University Press Inc (Verlag)
978-0-19-062756-0 (ISBN)
Oxford University Press Inc (Verlag)
978-0-19-062756-0 (ISBN)
Blasphemous Modernism argues that blasphemy is a signal mode of modernist literary expression. Reading a diverse range of poets (Mina Loy, Langston Hughes) and novelists (James Joyce, Djuna Barnes, Salman Rushdie), Pinkerton shows how these writers forged the literature of modernism from the idiom of blasphemy.
Scholars have long described modernism as "heretical" or "iconoclastic" in its assaults on secular traditions of form, genre, and decorum. Yet critics have paid surprisingly little attention to the related category of blasphemy--the rhetoric of religious offense--and to the specific ways this rhetoric operates in, and as, literary modernism. United by a shared commitment to "the word made flesh," writers such as James Joyce, Mina Loy, Richard Bruce Nugent, and Djuna Barnes made blasphemy a key component of their modernist practice, profaning the very scriptures and sacraments that fueled their art. In doing so they belied T. S. Eliot's verdict that the forces of secularization had rendered blasphemy obsolete in an increasingly godless century ("a world in which blasphemy is impossible"); their poems and fictions reveal how forcefully religion endured as a cultural force after the Death of God. Blasphemy respects no division of church and state, and neither do the writers who wield it to profane coercive dogmas--including ecclesiastical and terrestrial ideologies of race, class, nation, empire, gender, and sexuality. The late-century example of Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses affords, finally, a demonstration of how modernism persists in postwar Anglophone literature and of the critical role blasphemy plays in that persistence. The transgressions of these writers spotlight a politics of religion that has seldom engaged the attention of modernist studies. Blasphemous Modernism enriches the scope of modernist scholarship by resonating with broader cultural and ideological concerns.
Scholars have long described modernism as "heretical" or "iconoclastic" in its assaults on secular traditions of form, genre, and decorum. Yet critics have paid surprisingly little attention to the related category of blasphemy--the rhetoric of religious offense--and to the specific ways this rhetoric operates in, and as, literary modernism. United by a shared commitment to "the word made flesh," writers such as James Joyce, Mina Loy, Richard Bruce Nugent, and Djuna Barnes made blasphemy a key component of their modernist practice, profaning the very scriptures and sacraments that fueled their art. In doing so they belied T. S. Eliot's verdict that the forces of secularization had rendered blasphemy obsolete in an increasingly godless century ("a world in which blasphemy is impossible"); their poems and fictions reveal how forcefully religion endured as a cultural force after the Death of God. Blasphemy respects no division of church and state, and neither do the writers who wield it to profane coercive dogmas--including ecclesiastical and terrestrial ideologies of race, class, nation, empire, gender, and sexuality. The late-century example of Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses affords, finally, a demonstration of how modernism persists in postwar Anglophone literature and of the critical role blasphemy plays in that persistence. The transgressions of these writers spotlight a politics of religion that has seldom engaged the attention of modernist studies. Blasphemous Modernism enriches the scope of modernist scholarship by resonating with broader cultural and ideological concerns.
Steve Pinkerton is a Lecturer in English at Case Western Reserve University.
Contents
Introduction: "First-Rate Blasphemy"
1. "For This is My Body": James Joyce's Unholy Office
2. Blasphemy and the New Woman: Mina Loy's Profane Communions
3. Blasphemy and the New Negro: Black Christs,"Livid Tongues"
4. Go Down, Djuna: The Art of "Transcendence Downward"
Conclusion: To Be as Gods
Bibliography
| Erscheinungsdatum | 28.03.2017 |
|---|---|
| Reihe/Serie | Modernist Literature and Culture |
| Zusatzinfo | 3 halftones |
| Verlagsort | New York |
| Sprache | englisch |
| Maße | 236 x 155 mm |
| Gewicht | 748 g |
| Themenwelt | Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Anglistik / Amerikanistik |
| Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft | |
| ISBN-10 | 0-19-062756-5 / 0190627565 |
| ISBN-13 | 978-0-19-062756-0 / 9780190627560 |
| Zustand | Neuware |
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