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Christianity & Literature, 2014, Vol.63 (4), p.521-532
2014

Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte
Titel
Whispers of Faith in Contemporary American Literature
Ist Teil von
  • Christianity & Literature, 2014, Vol.63 (4), p.521-532
Ort / Verlag
Malibu: SAGE
Erscheinungsjahr
2014
Link zum Volltext
Quelle
Literature Online (LION)
Beschreibungen/Notizen
  • In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: 521 REVIEW ESSAY Whispers of Faith in Contemporary American Literature Paul T. Corrigan Christianity and Literature Vol. 63, No. 4 (Summer 2014) Partial Faiths: Postsecular Fiction in the Age of Pynchon and Morrison. John A. McClure. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007. Postmodern Belief: American Literature and Religion Since 1960. Amy Hungerford. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010. On Mount Vision: Forms of the Sacred in Contemporary American Poetry. Norman Finkelstein. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2010. Shouting and Whispering Religion in contemporary literature does not look like it used to, observes Paul Elie in a recent essay in The New York Times Sunday Book Review. Religious belief has become “bewildering,” “a mystery,” “part of the matrix,” “a reminder of last things,” and “a social matter rather than an individual one.” It “acts obscurely and inconclusively.” He counts these qualities losses. By “mystery,” he does not mean The Unknown so much as an unknown. By “part of the matrix,” he means merely part. By “a reminder of last things,” he means “reduced to” that. Though Elie begins with the rather specific claim that no contemporary novelists write about Christianity the way that Flannery O’Conner, Walker Percy, and others did in the middle of the twentieth century, before long he slides into a more expansive obituary for “religion” and “belief” in literature altogether.1 “Today,” he writes, “the United States is a vast Home Depot of ‘do-it-yourself religion.’ But you wouldn’t know it from the stories we tell.” As one example, he suggests that even though he finds Don DeLillo’s fiction “shot through with a mystical sense that ‘everything is connected in the end,’” “the religious belief” in such Christianity and Literature 522 work strikes him as “finally unreal.” Readers might wonder what more Elie wants. To answer just that question, he holds up Flannery O’Conner: “The religious encounter of the kind O’Connor described forces a person to ask how belief figures into his or her own life and how to decide just what is true in it, what is worth acting on.” He likewise affirms O’Connor’s famous, poignant comment about how she approached religion in her writing: “To the hard of hearing you shout...” In Elie’s view, writers no longer shout about faith. Gregory Wolfe sees things differently. Responding to Elie with an essay in The Wall Street Journal, he calls the idea of the demise of serious faithinfused literature part of a “misguided” “ritual lament.” As counterexamples, he points to such figures as Annie Dillard, Elie Wiesel, Christian Wiman, Marilynne Robinson, Mark Helprin, Franz Wright, Mary Karr and Robert Clark, Christopher R. Beha, Alice McDermott, Nathan Englander, and Jonathan Safran Foer, serious writers who engage faith in serious ways.2 But for Wolfe the “deeper matter” has to do not with whether one can list examples but rather with how one conceptualizes faith and literature in the first place. While he agrees with Elie that faith may be “obscure” and “mysterious” in contemporary literature, he sees these as positive characteristics that have “ancient” roots and that, just as importantly, speak meaningfully in our postmodern culture. As cultures change, “faith takes on different tones and dimensions.” Whereas O’Connor’s approach “made sense” in her time, other approaches make sense now. In support of this idea, Wolfe quotes the contemporary writer Doris Betts’ reversal of O’Connor’s shouting comment. In her own fiction, Betts feels compelled “to convey faith in whispers rather than shouts.” Wolfe concludes: “Today the faith found in literature is more whispered than shouted.” To hear it, we may need to listen “more closely to the still, small voice that is all around us.” Elie and Wolfe concur that the changes in the nature of religion in contemporary literature carry meaning. Elie writes that “belief is a fixture on the landscape even as its significance changes.” But Elie and Wolfe disagree on how to understand that changing significance. Should readers view these changes as lamentable, laudable, inevitable, indispensable? Do these changes signal a “post-Christian” flight from faith toward skepticism, or do they, just the other way around, announce a “postsecular” return from disenchantment toward That...

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