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Christianity & Literature, 2015, Vol.64 (4), p.483-486
2015

Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte
Titel
Secularization without End: Beckett, Mann, Coetzee by Vincent P. Pecora (review)
Ist Teil von
  • Christianity & Literature, 2015, Vol.64 (4), p.483-486
Ort / Verlag
Malibu: Johns Hopkins University Press
Erscheinungsjahr
2015
Link zum Volltext
Quelle
Literature Online (LION)
Beschreibungen/Notizen
  • In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Vincent P. Pecora, Secularization without End: Beckett, Mann, Coetzee. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2015. Pp. xiv + 214. $30.00. ISBN 978-0-268-03899-1. Vincent Pecora’s Secularization and Cultural Criticism (Chicago, 2006) both established his reputation as a major scholar of secularization in the world of literary and cultural studies and suggested a contrarian approach that was willing to take humanities and social science scholars to task for reducing religion to the status of ideology. Both of these characteristics are back on display in his new book Secularization without End, but this time Pecora’s focus is turned in a more decidedly literary direction, and his target is the history of the novel. Though the provenance of this book as a lecture series is still discernable in its occasional approach to the subject—there are chapters on Samuel Beckett and Thomas Mann and a double-length chapter devoted to J. M. Coetzee—Pecora presses his readings of these novelists into more ambitious territory with an introduction and a conclusion that seek to make a major intervention in the conversation about how the novel figures into accounts of secularization. Pecora ends up arguing that the novel is a much more religious genre than we thought, and that the novel represents one of the best efforts to wrestle with the traumas of modernity in a way that articulates repeatedly the impossibility of wringing redemption out of the epic violence perpetrated by advanced civilizations across the 20th century. In his introduction, Pecora seeks to create more distance in the relationship between the novel and secularization, a connection which Ian Watt’s Rise of the Novel (1957) argues is very close indeed. What allows Watt to write the history of the novel as the history of a preeminently secularizing form is his identification of religion with belief in miracles. Since the novel’s realist strategy cannot tolerate the miraculous, religion persists in the novel, according to Watt, only in the guise of Weber’s religion-as-ideology. Pecora’s critique of this narrow (but very influential) account of the secularization thesis in the history of the novel opens space for seeing more religion in the novel. He distinguishes a French Catholic trajectory of religious fiction from a Protestant English novel where religion is ‘‘underwritten,’’ or ‘‘invisible.’’ But eventually these national differences are resolved into the idea that the 19th-century novel marks an ‘‘aberration’’ within the history of the genre. The return to religion of some 20th- and 21st-century novels relies on a unique understanding of what religion is. Pecora argues that Walter Benjamin, in a brief unpublished essay, identified religion with the mimetic faculty, which Benjamin defines as the human ability to recognize and produce ‘‘nonsensuous similarity’’—the earliest example is dance, which Benjamin understands as an archaic attempt to reproduce the movement of the stars. As time passes, humans begin to rely on the semantic effects of language and largely lose the ability to experience this nonsensuous similarity. Instead of the full mimetic power of archaic religion, then, we are left with ‘‘a lightning flash of similarity within the arbitrary conventions of reading and writing.’’ This is what Pecora calls the ‘‘secular magic’’ of modern writing, and he says that readers are ‘‘always subject’’ to its power. Book Reviews 483 Insofar as Pecora’s Benjaminian account of religion and writing is brief, speculative , and generalizing, it is contestable in all sorts of ways. One of the more significant (and more problematic) suggestions here is that modern religion becomes synonymous with the sovereignty of language. Later Pecora will make clear that language in modernity takes up a divine position: ‘‘it is language that all along has been speaking the truth about itself, which is that it has been speaking through [people], quite apart from their awareness of one another’s ideas, instead of being spoken by them.’’ Here Pecora is very close to Giorgio Agamben’s claim in The Sacrament of Language (Stanford, 2011) that ‘‘Christianity is, in the proper sense of the term, a religion and a divinization of the Logos’’ (66). For this reason, Agamben says...
Sprache
Englisch
Identifikatoren
ISSN: 0148-3331
eISSN: 2056-5666
Titel-ID: cdi_proquest_journals_2447103849

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