Abstracts Category : Other

American Literature's Secular Faith

by Ray Horton

This dissertation argues for a new way to characterizethe relationship between religious discourse and aestheticattention in twentieth century American literature. The study ofreligion and literature has been dominated by two theses: on onehand, critics since Matthew Arnold have advanced a secularizationthesis where art serves as a surrogate for religion; on the otherhand, recent postsecular critics study how literature encodesreligious convictions. In this study, I demonstrate that animportant strain of twentieth century writing requires a thirdapproach, showing how writers achieve the artistic goal ofvivifying quotidian experience by incorporating faith as a formalelement. For example, in Marilynne Robinsons fiction, we might askwhy novels committed to a Calvinist belief in immortality aresimultaneously enamored with material experiences and ephemeralimages. Why does faith in eternity compel the narrator of Gilead toattend to the surfaces of ordinary objects, such as a cascade ofbubbles that floats past his window while he contemplates hisincipient mortality? I argue that Robinson is one of many writersfor whom the background of religious conviction activates anaesthetic process that renders the finite as uniquely worthy ofattention. For these writers, a robust engagement with religionmakes the secular newly visible.Writers as diverse as Robinson,Mark Twain, Willa Cather, James Baldwin, and Don DeLillo elicit newmodes of aesthetic attention as they engage religious discourse. Ifmodernist aesthetics are thought to be predicated upon finitude, asin Wallace Stevenss famous assertion that death is the mother ofbeauty, then this tradition of American writers revises thispremise, making the mundane newly visible by grappling withreligious ideas. Where American literary history is traditionallyconceived as a history of secularization, or as an archive ofreligious ideas that resist secularity, this study shows howreligions persistence over the past century has served toinstigate aesthetic attention to the ordinary.Advisors/Committee Members: Clune, Michael (Committee Chair).