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Restless Secularism: Modernism and the Religious Inheritance

Online ISBN:
9780300227963
Print ISBN:
9780300221732
Publisher:
Yale University Press
Book

Restless Secularism: Modernism and the Religious Inheritance

Matthew Mutter
Matthew Mutter
Bard College
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Published:
27 June 2017
Online ISBN:
9780300227963
Print ISBN:
9780300221732
Publisher:
Yale University Press

Abstract

Restless Secularism explores the efforts of modernist writers to articulate a viable secular imagination, to trace the relation of this secular imagination to the Christian culture from which it emerged, and to purify secular life of its religious residues. Yet it is also a study of the difficulty modernists have disentangling themselves from religious modes of understanding and experiencing the world, and emphasizes the persistent appeal of religious forms of imagination. The book contends that secularism has a distinct and historically contingent imaginary; it traces the modernist struggle both to articulate the contours of this imaginary and to elucidate its consequences for multiple fields of experience. Rather than focusing on private religious belief, the book shows, through a careful investigation of the work of Wallace Stevens, Virginia Woolf, W. B. Yeats, and W. H. Auden, how the shift from a religious to a secular imaginary has far-reaching consequences for our understanding of language, aesthetics, emotion, and the body and the material world. The book centers on Stevens’s attempts to pit a secular poetics of tautology against the religious promiscuity of metaphor, Woolf’s skirmishes with the eschatological significance of beauty, Yeats’s attempt to replace spiritualized emotion with the pagan “passions,” and Auden’s critique of magical thinking. Finally, it identifies a distinctly post-religious “problem of evil” that disturbs the secular imperative to affirm the immanence of life.

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