Religion 370: Religion and Disenchantment in 20th-century Literature

How is religion imagined in modern literature? In what ways has literature itself become a species of religious thought? This course explores how 20th-century literature reflects a crisis of meaning in modern religious thought, on the one hand, and how it sustains the religious through attachment to form, to loss, and to belief without meaning, on the other. The course will examine the relationship between words and things, knowledge and power, truth and illusion, and consider the ways literary representation expresses, transposes, and otherwise complicates these terms. We will read writers with both direct and oblique relationships to religious discourses and institutions, writers who bring religious forms of thinking to crisis, who invert its logics, who explore its hauntings, its silences, its ambiguities, and its enduring capacity to make meaning. We will take up these conceptual questions in conversation with the historical (social, political) dynamics out of which they emerge and to which they are posed. Readings will be drawn from authors such as Kafka, Borges, Morrison, Djebar, Coetzee, Endo, O’Connor, and Ngugi wa’ Thiong’o.