Download or read book The Absence of God in Modernist Literature written by G. Erickson and published by Springer. This book was released on 2007-05-14 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Uses recent thought in continental philosophy and postmodern theology to interpret hidden and contradictory 'god-ideas' in texts of modernism such as Henry James's The Golden Bowl , Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time , James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man , and Arnold Schoenberg's opera Moses und Aron .

Download or read book The Absence of God in Modernist Literature written by G. Erickson and published by Palgrave Macmillan. This book was released on 2007-06-08 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Uses recent thought in continental philosophy and postmodern theology to interpret hidden and contradictory 'god-ideas' in texts of modernism such as Henry James's The Golden Bowl , Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time , James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man , and Arnold Schoenberg's opera Moses und Aron .

Download or read book Modernism After the Death of God written by Stephen Kern and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-11-22 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modernism After the Death of God explores the work of seven influential modernists. Friedrich Nietzsche, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, André Gide, and Martin Heidegger criticized the destructive impact that they believed Christian sexual morality had had or threatened to have on their love life. Although not a Christian, Freud criticized the negative effect that Christian sexual morality had on his clinical subjects and on Western civilization, while Virginia Woolf condemned how her society was sanctioned by a patriarchal Christian authority. All seven worked to replace the loss or absence of Christian unity with non-Christian unifying projects in their respective fields of philosophy, psychiatry, or literature. The basic structure of their main contributions to modernist culture was a dynamic interaction of radical fragmentation necessitating radical unification that was always in process and never complete.

Download or read book Figures of Radical Absence written by Alexandra-Ecaterina Irimia and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2023-10-02 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although post-structuralism has highlighted the importance of what is offstage, lost, forgotten, hidden or discarded, silent or silenced, the poetics and politics of absence (much like its ethics and aesthetics) have rarely been discussed across media or disciplines. The book conceptualizes 'radical absence' to describe a certain tradition of resistance to ontology, predication, and representation, contesting their reliance on a metaphysics of presence. Apophatic speech, empty signifiers, and figural voids are some of the figures through which radical absence becomes apparent, with unprecedented intensity, in 20th-century theory, literature, film, and the arts. Phantasmatic and outrageous, such figures play with creative strategies of de-materialization, irony, and other forms of discursive undoing. Therefore, absence becomes more than a simple theme; it reflects back on the medium and the meaning-making conditions under which it operates. Elusive and imprecise as an object of study, absence is in need of more subtle and flexible epistemological frameworks. The author proposes to think it not only as a counter-concept for presence, but also - perhaps more productively - as infinite spacing, deferral, fragmentation, and displacement.

Download or read book From an Existential Vacuum to a Tragic Optimism written by Barbara A. Heavilin and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2014-07-03 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From an Existential Vacuum to a Tragic Optimism: The Search for Meaning and the Presence of God in Modern Literature employs a new theoretical approach to critical analysis: Victor Frankl’s logotherapy (from the Greek “logos” for word or reason and often related to divine wisdom), a unique form of existentialism. On the basis of his observations of the power of human endurance and transcendence – the discovery of meaning even in the midst of harrowing circumstances – Frankl diagnoses the malaise of the current age as an “existential vacuum,” a sense of meaninglessness. He suggests that a panacea for this malaise may be found in creativity, love, and moral choice – even when faced with suffering or death. He affirms that human beings may transcend this vacuum, discover meaning – or even ultimate meaning to be found in Ultimate Being, or God – and live with a sense of “tragic optimism.” This book observes both the current age’s “existential vacuum” – a malaise of emptiness and meaninglessness – and its longing for meaning and God as reflected in three genres: poetry, novel, and fantasy. Part I, “Reflections of God in the Poetic Vision,” addresses “tragic optimism” – hope when there seems to be no reason for hope – in poems by William Butler Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. Part II, “American Angst: Emptiness and Possibility in John Steinbeck’s Major Novels,” presents a study of Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, East of Eden, and The Winter of Our Discontent – novels that together form a uniquely American epic trilogy. Together these novels tell the story of a nation’s avarice, corruption, and betrayal offset by magnanimity, heroism, and hospitality. Set against the backdrop of Frankl’s ways of finding meaning and fulfillment – all obliquely implying the felt presence of God – the characters are representative Every Americans, in whose lives are reflected a nation’s worst vices and best hopes. Part III, “A Tragic Optimism: The Triumph of Good in the Fantasy Worlds of Tolkien, Lewis, and Rowling,” defines fantasy and science fiction as mirrors with which to view reality. J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, C. S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength, and J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series are considered in the light of Frankl’s logotherapy – providing paths to meaning and the ultimate meaning to be found in God. In a postmodern, fragmented age, these works affirm a continuing vision of God (often through His felt absence) and, also, a most human yearning for meaning even when there seems to be none – providing, as Frankl maintains, “a tragic optimism.”

Download or read book Christian Heresy James Joyce and the Modernist Literary Imagination written by Gregory Erickson and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-02-10 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Organized by heretical movements and texts from the Gnostic Gospels to The Book of Mormon, this book uses the work of James Joyce – particularly Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake – as a prism to explore how the history of Christian heresy remains part of how we read, write, and think about books today. Erickson argues that the study of classical, medieval, and modern debates over heresy and orthodoxy provide new ways of understanding modernist literature and literary theory. Using Joyce's works as a springboard to explore different perspectives and intersections of 20th century literature and the modern literary and religious imagination, this book gives us new insights into how our modern and “secular” reading practices unintentionally reflect how we understand our religious histories.

Download or read book Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel written by Pericles Lewis and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-01-07 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The modernist period witnessed attempts to explain religious experience in non-religious terms. Such novelists as Henry James, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Franz Kafka found methods to describe through fiction the sorts of experiences that had traditionally been the domain of religious mystics and believers. In Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel, Pericles Lewis considers the development of modernism in the novel in relation to changing attitudes to religion. Through comparisons of major novelists with sociologists and psychologists from the same period, Lewis identifies the unique ways that literature addressed the changing spiritual situation of the early twentieth century. He challenges accounts that assume secularisation as the main narrative for understanding twentieth-century literature. Lewis explores the experiments that modernists undertook in order to invoke the sacred without directly naming it, resulting in a compelling study for readers of twentieth-century modernist literature.

Download or read book Poetry and Theology in the Modernist Period written by Anthony Domestico and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2017-10-17 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What if the religious themes and allusions in modernist poetry are not just metaphors? Following the religious turn in other disciplines, literary critics have emphasized how modernists like Woolf and Joyce were haunted by Christianity’s cultural traces despite their own lack of belief. In Poetry and Theology in the Modernist Period, Anthony Domestico takes a different tack, arguing that modern poets such as T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, and David Jones were interested not just in the aesthetic or social implications of religious experience but also in the philosophically rigorous, dogmatic vision put forward by contemporary theology. These poets took seriously the truth claims of Christian theology: for them, religion involved intellectual and emotional assent, doctrinal articulation, and ritual practice. Domestico reveals how an important strand of modern poetry actually understood itself in and through the central theological questions of the modernist era: What is transcendence, and how can we think and write about it? What is the sacramental act, and how does its wedding of the immanent and the transcendent inform the poetic act? How can we relate kairos (holy time) to chronos (clock time)? Seeking answers to these complex questions, Domestico examines both modernist institutions (the Criterion) and specific works of modern poetry (Eliot’s Four Quartets and Jones’s The Anathemata). The book also traces the contours of what it dubs “theological modernism”: a body of poetry that is both theological and modernist. In doing so, this book offers a new literary history of the modernist period, one that attends both to the material circulation of texts and to the broader intellectual currents of the time.

Download or read book The English Modernist Novel as Political Theology written by Charles Andrews and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2024-01-11 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploring novels by Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, Evelyn Waugh, and Sylvia Townsend Warner as political theology – works that imagine a resistance to the fusion of Christianity and patriotism which fuelled and supported the First World War – this book shows how we can gain valuable insights from their works for anti-militarist, anti-statist, and anti-nationalist efforts today. While none of the four novelists in this study were committed Christians during the 1920s, Andrews explores how their fiction written in the wake of the First World War operates theologically when it challenges English civil religion – the rituals of the nation that elevate the state to a form of divinity. Bringing these novels into a dialogue with recent political theologies by theorists and theologians including Giorgio Agamben, William Cavanaugh, Simon Critchley, Michel Foucault, Stanley Hauerwas and Jürgen Moltmann, this book shows the myriad ways that we can learn from the authors' theopolitical imaginations. Andrews demonstrates the many ways that these novelists issue a challenge to the problems with civil religion and the sacralized nation state and, in so doing, offer alternative visions to coordinate our inner lives with our public and collective actions.

Download or read book The Vanguard Messiah written by Sami Sjöberg and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2015-08-17 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent years the role of religion in the avant-garde has begun to attract scholarly interest. The present volume focuses on the work of the Romanian Jewish poet and visual artist Isidore Isou (1925–2007) who founded the lettrist movement in the 1940s. The Jewish tradition played a critical part in the Western avant-garde as represented by lettrism. The links between lettrism and Judaism are substantial, yet they have been largely unexplored until now. The study investigates the works of a movement that explicitly emphasises its vanguard position while relying on a medieval religious tradition as a source of radical textual techniques. It accounts for lettrism’s renunciation of mainstream traditions in favour of a subversive tradition, in this case Jewish mysticism. The religious inclination of lettrism also affects the notion of the avant-garde. The elements of the Jewish tradition in Isou’s theories and artistic production evoke a broader framework where religion and experimental art supplement each other.

Download or read book Angels of Modernism written by S. Hobson and published by Springer. This book was released on 2011-10-26 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The angel can be viewed as a signal reference to modernist attempts to accommodate religious languages to self-consciously modern cultures. This book uses the angel to explore the relations between modernist literature and early twentieth-century debates over the secular and/or religious character of the modern age.

Download or read book Music and Literary Modernism written by Robert P. McParland and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2009-10-02 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Music and Literary Modernism, the intersections of music, literature and language are examined by an international group of scholars who engage in studies of modernist art and practice. The essays collected here present the significant place of music in the writing of T.S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, James Weldon Johnson, Mina Loy, Stephen Mallarme, Ezra Pound, Marcel Proust, Gertrude Stein,Wallace Stevens and Virginia Woolf, as well as the importance of literary art for composers such as George Antheil, Pierre Boulez, Olivier Messaein, and The Beatles. Contributors explore the role of music and literary modernism in the postmodern sublime, sound and "music" in language, the uneasy alliance of jazz and pop song in high modernist work, the Beatles as modernists, and other topics. This is a revised and updated second edition.

Download or read book Blasphemous Modernism written by Steve Pinkerton and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-03-03 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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. More, their transgressions spotlight a politics of religion that has seldom engaged the attention of modernist studies. Blasphemy respects no division of church and state, and neither do the writers who wield it to profane all manner of coercive dogmas--including ecclesiastical as well as more worldly 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. Blasphemous Modernism thus resonates with the broader cultural and ideological concerns that in recent years have enriched the scope of modernist scholarship.

Download or read book Reading Heresy written by Gregory Erickson and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2017-11-20 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Heresy studies is a new interdisciplinary, supra-religious, and humanist field of study that focuses on borderlands of dogma, probes the intersections between orthodoxy and heterodoxy, and explores the realms of dissent in religion, art, and literature. Free from confessional agendas and tolerant of both religious and non-religious perspectives, heresy studies fulfill an important gap in scholarly inquiry and artistic production. Divided into four parts, the volume explores intersections between heresy and modern literature, it discusses intricacies of medieval heresies, it analyzes issues of heresy in contemporary theology, and it demonstrates how heresy operates as an artistic stimulant. Rather than treating matters of heresy, blasphemy, unbelief, dissent, and non-conformism as subjects to be shunned or naively championed, the essays in this collection chart a middle course, energized by the dynamics of heterodoxy, dissent, and provocation, yet shining a critical light on both the challenges and the revelations of disruptive kinds of thinking and acting.

Download or read book The Routledge Companion to Literature and Religion written by Mark Knight and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-28 with total page 641 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This unique and comprehensive volume looks at the study of literature and religion from a contemporary critical perspective. Including discussion of global literature and world religions, this Companion looks at: Key moments in the story of religion and literary studies from Matthew Arnold through to the impact of 9/11 A variety of theoretical approaches to the study of religion and literature Different ways that religion and literature are connected from overtly religious writing, to subtle religious readings Analysis of key sacred texts and the way they have been studied, re-written, and questioned by literature Political implications of work on religion and literature Thoroughly introduced and contextualised, this volume is an engaging introduction to this huge and complex field.

Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Modernist Culture written by Celia Marshik and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This companion provides students and scholars alike with an interdisciplinary approach to literary modernism. Through essays written on a range of cultural contexts, this collection helps readers understand the significant changes in belief systems, visual culture, and pastimes that influenced, and were influenced by, the experimental literature published around 1890-1945.

Download or read book Literary Passports written by Shachar Pinsker and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2010-12-13 with total page 504 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Literary Passports is the first book to explore modernist Hebrew fiction in Europe in the early decades of the twentieth century. It not only serves as an introduction to this important body of literature, but also acts as a major revisionist statement, freeing this literature from a Zionist-nationalist narrative and viewing it through the wider lens of new comparative studies in modernism. The book's central claim is that modernist Hebrew prose-fiction, as it emerged from 1900 to 1930, was shaped by the highly charged encounter of traditionally educated Jews with the revolution of European literature and culture known as modernism. The book deals with modernist Hebrew fiction as an urban phenomenon, explores the ways in which the genre dealt with issues of sexuality and gender, and examines its depictions of the complex relations between tradition, modernity, and religion.