Download or read book Fiction Beyond Secularism written by Justin Neuman and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2014-07-31 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modernist thinkers once presumed a progressive secularity, with the novel replacing religious texts as society’s moral epics. Yet religion—beginning with the Iranian revolution of 1979, through the collapse of communism, and culminating in the singular rupture of September 11, 2001—has not retreated quietly out of sight. In Fiction Beyond Secularism, Justin Neuman argues that contemporary novelists who are most commonly identified as antireligious—among them Orhan Pamuk, Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, Margaret Atwood, Nadine Gordimer, Haruki Murakami, and J. M. Coetzee—have defied assumptions and have instead written some of the most trenchant critiques of secular ideologies, as well as the most exciting and rigorous inquiries into the legacies of the religious imagination. As a result, many readers (or nonreaders) on either side of the religious divide neglect the insights of works like The Satanic Verses, Disgrace, and Snow. Fiction Beyond Secularism serves as a timely corrective.

Download or read book Limiting Secularism written by Priya Kumar and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2008-01-01 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With a backdrop of religious violence and escalating regional tensions in South Asia, Priya Kumar’s Limiting Secularism probes the urgent topic of secularism and tolerance in Indian culture and life. Kumar explores Partition as the founding trauma of the Indian nation-state and traces the consequences of its marking off of “Indian” from “Pakistani” and the positioning of Indian Muslims as strangers within the nation. Kumar unpacks the implications of the Nehruvian doctrine of tolerance-with all of its resonances of condescension and inequality-and asks whether more ethical cohabitation can replace the “arrogant compulsive tolerance” of the state and the majority. Informed by Jacques Derrida’s recent work on hospitality and living together, Kumar argues for the emergence of an “ethics of coexistence” in Indian fiction and film. Considering narratives ranging from the cosmopolitan English novels of Rushdie and Ghosh to literature in South Asian languages as well as recent Hindi cinema, Kumar demonstrates that these fictions are important resources for reimagining tolerance and coexistence. Distinctive and timely in its investigation of secularism and communalism, Limiting Secularism works to envision the radical possibilities of going beyond tolerance to living well together. Priya Kumar is associate professor of English at the University of Iowa.

Download or read book Rethinking the Secular Origins of the Novel written by Kevin Seidel and published by . This book was released on 2021-03-17 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Challenging concepts of religion and secularism, this book shows the English novel rising with the English Bible, not after it.

Download or read book A World Abandoned by God written by Susanna Lee and published by Bucknell University Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The idea of God, in one form or another, is a fundamental part of human experience - a given, almost. And yet, for over one hundred and fifty years, we have lived in a world become increasingly secular. The goal of this book is to reconcile these facts, or rather to examine their interaction and, in so doing, to understand the idea and the experience of secularism. Concentrating on five canonical French and Russian novels of the nineteenth century (Stendahl's The Red and the Black, Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Ivan Turgenev's A Nest of Gentry, Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly's Bewitched, and Fyodor Dostoevsky's Demons) and using the instruments of narrative theory, this book offers a groundbreaking critical foundation for understanding both the evolution of secular culture and the new role of the individual in modern ethical, political, and spiritual contexts.

Download or read book Secularism and Cosmopolitanism written by Étienne Balibar and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2018-06-19 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is the relationship between cosmopolitanism and secularism—the worldwide and the worldly? While cosmopolitan politics may seem inherently secular, existing forms of secularism risk undermining the universality of cosmopolitanism because they privilege the European tradition over all others and transform particular historical norms into enunciations of truth, valid for all cultures and all epochs. In this book, the noted philosopher Étienne Balibar explores the tensions lurking at this troubled nexus in order to advance a truly democratic and emancipatory cosmopolitanism, which requires a secularization of secularism itself. Balibar argues for the idea of the universal against its particular dominant institutions. He questions the assumptions that underlie popular ideas of secularism and religion and outlines the importance of a new critique for the contemporary world. Balibar holds that conflicts between religious and secular discourses need to be reframed from a point of view that takes into account the cultural hybridization, migration and mobility, and transformation of borders that have reshaped the postcolonial age. Among the topics discussed are the uses and misuses of the category of religion and the religious, the paradoxical genealogy of monotheism, French laïcité’s identitarian turn, and the implications of the responses to the Charlie Hebdo attacks for an extended definition of free speech. Going beyond circumscribed notions of religion and the public sphere, Secularism and Cosmopolitanism is a profound rethinking of identity and difference that seeks to make room for a renewed political imagination.

Download or read book Freedom of Religion and the Secular State written by Russell Blackford and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2012-02-07 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploring the relationship between religion and the state Focusing on the intersection of religion, law, and politics in contemporary liberal democracies, Blackford considers the concept of the secular state, revising and updating enlightenment views for the present day. Freedom of Religion and the Secular State offers a comprehensive analysis, with a global focus, of the subject of religious freedom from a legal as well as historical and philosophical viewpoint. It makes an original contribution to current debates about freedom of religion, and addresses a whole range of hot-button issues that involve the relationship between religion and the state, including the teaching of evolution in schools, what to do about the burqa, and so on.

Download or read book The Joy of Secularism written by George Levine and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2011-02-22 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a balanced and thoughtful approach for understanding an enlightened, sympathetic, and relevant secularism for our lives today. Bringing together distinguished historians, philosophers, scientists, and writers, this book shows that secularism is not a mere denial of religion.

Download or read book Unbelief in Interwar Literary Culture written by Suzanne Hobson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-02 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume offers a new account of the relationship between literary and secularist scenes of writing in interwar Britain. Organized secularism has sometimes been seen as a phenomenon that lived and died with the nineteenth century. But associations such as the National Secular Society and the Rationalist Press Association survived into the twentieth and found new purpose in the promotion and publishing of serious literature. This book assembles a group of literary figures whose work was recommended as being of particular interest to the unbelieving readership targeted by these organisations. Some, including Vernon Lee, H.G. Wells, Naomi Mitchison, and K.S. Bhat, were members or friends of the R.P.A.; others, such as Mary Butts, were sceptical but nonetheless registered its importance in their work; a third group, including D.H. Lawrence and George Moore, wrote in ways seen as sympathetic to the Rationalist cause. All of these writers produced fiction that was experimental in form and, though few of them could be described as modernist, they shared with modernist writers a will to innovate. This book explores how Rationalist ideas were adapted and transformed by these experiments, focusing in particular on the modifications required to accommodate the strong mode of unbelief associated with British secularism to the notional mode of belief usually solicited by fiction. Whereas modernism is often understood as the literature for a secular age, Unbelief in Interwar Literary Culture looks elsewhere to find a literature that draws more directly on secularism for its aesthetics and its ethics.

Download or read book Secularization without End written by Vincent P. Pecora and published by University of Notre Dame Pess. This book was released on 2015-03-15 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Secularization without End: Beckett, Mann, Coetzee, Vincent P. Pecora elaborates an alternative history of the twentieth-century Western novel that explains the resurgence of Christian theological ideas. Standard accounts of secularization in the novel assume the gradual disappearance of religious themes through processes typically described as rationalization: philosophy and science replace faith. Pecora shows, however, that in the modern novels he examines, "secularization" ceases to mean emancipation from the prescientific ignorance or enchantment commonly associated with belief and signifies instead the shameful state of a humanity bereft of grace and undeserving of redemption. His book focuses on the unpredictable and paradoxical rediscovery of theological perspectives in otherwise secular novels after 1945. The narratives he analyzes are all seemingly godless in their overt points of view, from Samuel Beckett’s Murphy to Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus to J. M. Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus. But, Pecora argues, these novels wind up producing varieties of religious doctrine drawn from Augustinian and Calvinist claims about primordial guilt and the impotence of human will. In the most artfully imaginative ways possible, Beckett, Mann, and Coetzee resist the apparently inevitable plot that so many others have constructed for the history of the novel, by which human existence is reduced to mundane and meaningless routines and nothing more. Instead, their writing invokes a religious past that turns secular modernity, and the novel itself, inside out.

Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Religion written by Susan M. Felch and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-09-12 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Each essay in this Companion examines one or more literary texts and a religious tradition to illustrate how we can understand both literature and religion better by looking at them in tandem. Unlike most literature and religion books, which tend to focus on Christianity and take a highly theoretical approach inappropriate for non-specialists, The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Religion offers an accessible treatment of both Dharmic and Abrahamic traditions. It provides close readings of texts rather than surveys of large topics, making it an ideal resource for undergraduate and graduate students of literature and religion.

Download or read book Beyond Secularism and Jihad written by Peter D. Beaulieu and published by University Press of America. This book was released on 2012-07-13 with total page 479 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Peter D. Beaulieu examines the challenge posed by—and to—modernity and historic Islam as they encounter one another. He compares the Western separation of Church and state with the unitary Islamic State, and explores the proposed cultural and societal principles of the Second Vatican Council as potentially influencing long-term events in both arenas. Beaulieu’s research is comprehensive and richly documented, yet offers an accessible triangular inquiry into the mosque, the manger, and modernity. By restoring a place at the table for Trinitarian Christianity alongside the engulfing monotheism of Islam and the alternative skepticism of Western rationalism, this inquiry broadens the pallet of inter-religious and intercultural contact points. Beyond Secularism and Jihad? provides balanced attention to the differences as well as the similarities between Christianity, Islam, and modernity. An emerging theme is natural law, which is universal and intrinsic to all mankind and not confined to competing theologies. Neglected in the West that it helped create, natural law might contribute to the needed “grammar” for dialogue between the citizens in the West and the followers of Islam.

Download or read book Modern Egyptian Women Fashion and Faith written by Amany Abdelrazek-Alsiefy and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-12-05 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book discusses Egyptian Muslim women’s dress as the social, political and ideological signifier of the changing attitudes towards Western modernity. It employs women’s clothing styles as a feminist act that provides rich insights into the power and limits of legal regulations and hegemonic discourses in constructing gendered and cultural borders in the modern Egyptian public sphere. Furthermore, through highlighting marginalized but significant models and historical moments of cultural exchange between Muslim and Western cultures through female dress, the book tells a third story beyond the binary model of an assumed modest oppressed traditional Muslim woman vis-à-vis consumer emancipated modern Western woman in mainstream Western discourse and literary representation.

Download or read book The Enchantress of Florence written by Salman Rushdie and published by Knopf Canada. This book was released on 2009-02-24 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A tall, yellow-haired young European traveller calling himself “Mogor dell’Amore,” the Mughal of Love, arrives at the court of the real Grand Mughal, the Emperor Akbar, with a tale to tell that begins to obsess the whole imperial capital. The stranger claims to be the child of a lost Mughal princess, the youngest sister of Akbar’s grandfather Babar: Qara Köz, ‘Lady Black Eyes’, a great beauty believed to possess powers of enchantment and sorcery, who is taken captive first by an Uzbeg warlord, then by the Shah of Persia, and finally becomes the lover of a certain Argalia, a Florentine soldier of fortune, commander of the armies of the Ottoman Sultan. When Argalia returns home with his Mughal mistress the city is mesmerised by her presence, and much trouble ensues. The Enchantress of Florence is a love story and a mystery – the story of a woman attempting to command her own destiny in a man’s world. It brings together two cities that barely know each other – the hedonistic Mughal capital, in which the brilliant emperor wrestles daily with questions of belief, desire and the treachery of sons, and the equally sensual Florentine world of powerful courtesans, humanist philosophy and inhuman torture, where Argalia’s boyhood friend ‘il Machia’ – Niccolò Machiavelli – is learning, the hard way, about the true brutality of power. These two worlds, so far apart, turn out to be uncannily alike, and the enchantments of women hold sway over them both. But is Mogor’s story true? And if so, then what happened to the lost princess? And if he’s a liar, must he die?

Download or read book Realism Ethics and Secularism written by George Levine and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2008-10-09 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: George Levine is one of the world's leading scholars of Victorian literature and culture. This collection of his essays develops the key themes of his work: the intersection of nineteenth-century British literature, culture and science and the relation of knowledge and truth to ethics. The essays offer perspectives on George Eliot, Thackeray, the Positivists, and the Scientific Naturalists, and reassess the complex relationship between Ruskin and Darwin. In readings of Lawrence and Coetzee, Levine addresses Victorian and modern efforts to push beyond the limits of realist art by testing its aesthetic and epistemological limits in engagement with the self and the other. Some of Levine's most important contributions to the field are reprinted, in revised and updated form, alongside previously unpublished material. Together, these essays cohere into an exploration both of Victorian literature and culture and of ethical, epistemological, and aesthetic problems fundamental to our own times.

Download or read book Living the Secular Life written by Phil Zuckerman and published by Penguin Books. This book was released on 2015-10-27 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A sociology professor examines the demographic shift that has led more Americans than ever before to embrace a nonreligious life and highlights the inspirational stories and beliefs that empower modern-day secular culture.

Download or read book Postsecular Poetics written by Rebekah Cumpsty and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-08-11 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is the first full-length study of the postsecular in African literatures. Religion, secularism, and the intricate negotiations between the two, codified in recent criticism as postsecularism, are fundamental conditions of globalized modernity. These concerns have been addressed in social science disciplines, but they have largely been neglected in postcolonial and literary studies. To remedy this oversight, this monograph draws together four areas of study: it brings debates in religious and postsecular studies to bear on African literatures and postcolonial studies. The focus of this interdisciplinary study is to understand how postsecular negotiations manifest in postcolonial African settings and how they are represented and registered in fiction. Through this focus, this book reveals how African and African-diasporic authors radically disrupt the epistemological and ontological modalities of globalized literary production, often characterized as secular, and imagine alternatives which incorporate the sacred into a postsecular world.

Download or read book Sex and Secularism written by Joan Wallach Scott and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2019-11-12 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Drawing on a wealth of scholarship by second-wave feminists and historians of religion, race, and colonialism, Scott shows that the gender equality invoked today as a fundamental and enduring principle was not originally associated with the term "secularism" when it first entered the lexicon in the nineteenth century. In fact, the inequality of the sexes was fundamental to the articulation of the separation of church and state that inaugurated Western modernity. Scott points out that Western nation-states imposed a new order of women's subordination, assigning them to a feminized familial sphere meant to complement the rational masculine realms of politics and economics. It was not until the question of Islam arose in the late twentieth century that gender equality became a primary feature of the discourse of secularism"-- Publisher's description