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Author : Vincent P. Pecora Publisher : University of Chicago Press Page : 254 pages File Size : 53,8 Mb Release : 2006-10 Category : Literary Criticism ISBN : 9780226653129
Secularization and Cultural Criticism by Vincent P. Pecora Pdf
'Secularization and Cultural Criticism' examines the responses of a wide range of thinkers to illustrate exactly why the problem of secularisation in the study of society and culture should matter once again.
Edward Said and the Religious Effects of Culture by William D. Hart Pdf
This book provides a distinctive account of Edward Said's critique of modern culture by highlighting the religion-secularism distinction on which it is predicated. It refers to religious and secular traditions and to tropes that extend the meaning and reference of religion and secularism in indeterminate ways. It covers Said's heterogeneous corpus--from Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography, his first book, to Orientalism, his most influential book, to his recent writings on the Palestinian question. The religion-secularism distinction lies behind Said's cultural criticism, and his notion of intellectual responsibility.
Secularization without End by Vincent P. Pecora Pdf
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.
Secularism and Cosmopolitanism by Étienne Balibar Pdf
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.
New Age Religion and Western Culture by Wouter J. Hanegraaff Pdf
Presents the first systematic analysis of the structure and beliefs of the New Age movement, and the historical emergence of "New Age" as a secularized version of Western esoteric traditions.
The journalist and critic Siegfried Kracauer is best remembered today for his investigations of film and other popular media, and for his seminal influence on Frankfurt School thinkers like Theodor Adorno. Less well known is his earlier work, which offered a seismographic reading of cultural fault lines in Weimar-era Germany, with an eye to the confrontation between religious revival and secular modernity. In this discerning study, historian Harry T. Craver reconstructs and richly contextualizes Kracauer’s early output, showing how he embodied the contradictions of modernity and identified the quasi-theological impulses underlying the cultural ferment of the 1920s.
Critical Secularism by Stathis Gourgouris,Aamir R. Mufti,Emily Apter Pdf
This boundary 2 special issue, Critical Secularism, brings together renowned figures in cultural studies and literary theory to critically rethink the narratives of secularization that characterize modern culture.
Power and Responsibility in Biblical Interpretation by Alissa Jones Nelson Pdf
'Power and Responsibility in Biblical Interpretation' addresses the interpretive challenges now facing much biblical interpretation. Incorporating the methodologies of poststructuralism, postcolonialism, and liberation theology, the study presents a possible methodology which integrates scholarly and vernacular hermeneutics. The approach is based on the theories of Edward Said, adapting his concept of contrapuntal reading to the interpretation of 'Job'. The book sets this study in the broader context of a survey of current work in the field. The analysis of 'Job' examines the possibilities for dialogue between those interpretations that view suffering as a key theme in the book and those that do not. Interpretations of the 'Book of Job' are then compared to the psychology of suffering as experienced in various contexts today. The conclusion argues for pedagogical reform based upon the ethical and interpretive insights of contrapuntal hermeneutics.
Secularism and Biblical Studies by Roland Boer Pdf
What is secular biblical criticism? 'Secularism and Biblical Studies' presents a selection of essays that examine the nature of secular biblical studies and its hermeneutical principles. The essays outline and analyse debates within biblical studies over the issue of secularism and explore the interplay of atheism, agnosticism and faith in the interpretation of the Bible. The book argues for a hermeneutics of suspicion and a wider engagement with cultural, literary and anthropological disciplines. Examining biblical hermeneutics from a range of perspectives - from Europe, Israel and the USA - 'Secularism and Biblical Studies' offers a provocative and challenging approach that will be of interest to all students and scholars of the Bible.
A scholarly and deeply sensitive study that explores how religion and secularism are tightly interwoven in the major works of modernist literature Matthew Mutter provides a broad survey of modernist literature, examining key works against a background of philosophy, theology, intellectual and social history, while tracing the relationship of modernism’s secular imagination to the religious cultures that both preceded and shaped it. Mutter’s provocative study demonstrates how, despite their explicit desire to purify secular life of its religious residues, Wallace Stevens, Virginia Woolf, and other literary modernists consistently found themselves entangled in the religious legacies they disavowed.
Confronting Secularism in Europe and India by Brian Black,Gavin Hyman,Graham M. Smith Pdf
Can secularism continue to provide a foundation for political legitimacy? It is often claimed that one of the cultural achievements of the West has been its establishment of secular democracy, wherein religious belief is respected but confined to the sphere of private belief. In more recent times, however, political secularism has been increasingly called into question. Religious believers, in numerous traditions, have protested against the distortion and confinement that secularism imposes on their faith. Others have become uneasily aware of the way in which secularism no longer commands universal assent in the way it once did. Confronting Secularism in Europe and India adds to this debate by staging a creative encounter between European and Indian conceptions of secularism with a view to continuing new and distinctive trajectories of thought about the place and role of secularism in contemporary times. Looking at political secularism, the relationship between secularism and religion, and religious and secular violence, this book considers whether there are viable alternatives to secularism in Europe and in India.
Reframing Critical, Literary, and Cultural Theories by Nicoletta Pireddu Pdf
This book participates in the ongoing debate about the alleged “death of theory” and the current post-theoretical condition, arguing that the “finitude” of theoretical projects does not mean “end”, but rather contingency and transformation of thinking, beyond irreconcilable doctrines. Contributors from different cultural and scholarly backgrounds and based in three different continents propose new areas of investigation and interpretive possibilities, reopening dialogues with past and present discourses from a plurality of perspectives and locations. After a first section that reassesses the status and scopes of critique, theory, and literature, the book foregrounds new or neglected critical vocabulary, literary paradigms, and narrative patterns to reread texts at the intersection with other branches of the humanities—history, philosophy, religion, and pedagogy. It then explores geopolitical, cultural, and epistemological domains that have been historically and ideologically overdetermined (such as postsocialist, postcolonial, and cosmopolitan spaces), recodifying them as unstable sites of both conflicts and convergences. By acknowledging the spatio-temporal and cultural delimitations of any intellectual practice, the book creates awareness of our own partiality and incompleteness, but treats boundaries as zones of contact, exchange, and conceptual mobility that promote crossings and connections.
Overcoming Matthew Arnold by James Walter Caufield Pdf
Opening the way for a reexamination of Matthew Arnold's unique contributions to ethical criticism, James Walter Caufield emphasizes the central role of philosophical pessimism in Arnold's master tropes of "culture" and "conduct." Caufield uses Arnold's ethics as a lens through which to view key literary and cultural movements of the past 150 years, demonstrating that Arnoldian conduct is grounded in a Victorian ethic of "renouncement," a form of altruism that wholly informs both Arnold's poetry and prose and sets him apart from the many nineteenth-century public moralists. Arnold's thought is situated within a cultural and philosophical context that shows the continuing relevance of "renouncement" to much contemporary ethical reflection, from the political kenosis of Giorgio Agamben and the pensiero debole of Gianni Vattimo, to the ethical criticism of Wayne C. Booth and Martha Nussbaum. In refocusing attention on Arnold's place within the broad history of critical and social thought, Caufield returns the poet and critic to his proper place as a founding father of modern cultural criticism.
Edward Said's Translocations by Tobias Doring,Mark U Stein Pdf
Working with processes of translocation enabled Edward Said to point out interdependence and complementarity across geographical borders and disciplinary boundaries while recognizing cultural difference and the distinct historical experiences of colonizer and colonized. This book brings into focus Said’s politics of reading, from his literary criticism in English to his political columns in Arabic. The international contributors—from Britain, Egypt, France, Germany, India, Switzerland, and the United States—investigate his intellectual legacies without necessarily identifying themselves with the critical positions these involve. Instead of treating his work as a unitary theoretical system, the various arguments explored offer a critical assessment of those situations in which his writing has entered into a productive relationship with other theoretical positions and interlocutors. The collection considers location, which has always been a central category in and for Said’s writing; readings, which designates the acts by which, according to Said, the world comes to be constituted; and legacies, which pertains to the many fields across the boundaries of established academic disciplines that have taken up Said’s challenges. The critical positions visited in this book include critical and cultural theory, postcolonialism, literary studies, theatre and performance studies, and visual and music studies.
The case for a thoughtful secularism from some of today's most distinguished scientists, philosophers, and writers Can secularism offer us moral, aesthetic, and spiritual satisfaction? Or does the secular view simply affirm a dog-eat-dog universe? At a time when the issues of religion, evolution, atheism, fundamentalism, Darwin, and science fill headlines and invoke controversy, The Joy of Secularism 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. Rather, this positive and necessary condition presents a vision of a natural and difficult world—without miracles or supernatural interventions—that is far richer and more satisfying than the religious one beyond. From various perspectives—philosophy, evolutionary biology, primate study, Darwinian thinking, poetry, and even bird-watching—the essays in this collection examine the wealth of possibilities that secularism offers for achieving a condition of fullness. Factoring in historical contexts, and ethical and emotional challenges, the contributors make an honest and heartfelt yet rigorous case for the secular view by focusing attention on aspects of ordinary life normally associated with religion, such as the desire for meaning, justice, spirituality, and wonder. Demonstrating that a world of secular enchantment is a place worth living in, The Joy of Secularism takes a new and liberating look at a valuable and complex subject. The contributors are William Connolly, Paolo Costa, Frans de Waal, Philip Kitcher, George Levine, Adam Phillips, Robert Richards, Bruce Robbins, Rebecca Stott, Charles Taylor, and David Sloan Wilson.
