Partial Faiths: Postsecular Fiction in the Age of Pynchon and Morrison - Couverture souple

McClure, John A.

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 0820330337 ISBN 13 : 9780820330334

Editeur : University of Georgia Press, 2007

Synopsis

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.

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

JOHN A. MCCLURE is a professor of English and associate director of the graduate program in the English department at Rutgers University. He is the author of Late Imperial Romance and Kipling and Conrad: The Colonial Fiction.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: University of Georgia Press
• Date d'édition: 2007
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0820330337
• ISBN 13: 9780820330334
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 224
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible