Blasphemous Modernism: The 20th-century Word Made Flesh
- ISBN-10
- 0190627565
- ISBN-13
- 9780190627560
- Category
- Modernism (Aesthetics)
- Pages
- 184
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2017
- Publisher
- Oxford University Press
- Author
- Steven Pinkerton
Description
Scholars have long described modernism as "heretical" or "iconoclastic" in its assaults on secular traditions of form, genre, and decorum. Yet critics have paid surprisingly little attention to the related category of blasphemy--the rhetoric of religious offense--and to the specific ways this rhetoric operates in, and as, literary modernism. United by a shared commitment to "the word made flesh," writers such as James Joyce, Mina Loy, Richard Bruce Nugent, and Djuna Barnes made blasphemy a key component of their modernist practice, profaning the very scriptures and sacraments that fueled their art. In doing so they belied T. S. Eliot's verdict that the forces of secularization had rendered blasphemy obsolete in an increasingly godless century ("a world in which blasphemy is impossible"); their poems and fictions reveal how forcefully religion endured as a cultural force after the Death of God. More, their transgressions spotlight a politics of religion that has seldom engaged the attention of modernist studies. Blasphemy respects no division of church and state, and neither do the writers who wield it to profane all manner of coercive dogmas--including ecclesiastical as well as more worldly ideologies of race, class, nation, empire, gender, and sexuality. The late-century example of Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses affords, finally, a demonstration of how modernism persists in postwar anglophone literature and of the critical role blasphemy plays in that persistence. Blasphemous Modernism thus resonates with the broader cultural and ideological concerns that in recent years have enriched the scope of modernist scholarship.
Get the book
Other editions
-
- 2017-03-03
- 256 pages
- Ebook
- Oxford University Press
-
- 2017-03-03
- 256 pages
- Ebook
- Oxford University Press
Similar books
-
Prophets of Extremity: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida
By Allan MegillIn this book, the author presents an interpretation of four thinkers: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, and Derrida.
-
Alfred Jarry: The Carnival of Being
By Sheelagh Bevan"Published to accompany an exhibition at the Morgan Library & Museum, January 24-May 10, 2020."
-
Phenomenology, Modernism and Beyond
By Ariane Mildenberg, Carole Bourne-TaylorIt is this aspect of modernism that this book brings to the fore. The essays presented here bring into focus the contemporary face of ongoing debates about phenomenology and modernism.
-
Only Connect: A Passage from Modernism to Postmodernism
By Felix NicolauOnly Connect: A Passage from Modernism to Postmodernism
-
Post-war Cinema and Modernity: A Film Reader
By Orr John OrrPost-war Cinema and Modernity explores the relationship between film and modernity in the second half of the twentieth century. Its distinguishing feature is the focus on the close connections between history, theory and textual criticism.
-
La canonización del diablo: Baudelaire y la estética moderna en España
By Luis T. González del Valle... la ficción breve de Valle - Inclán . » Valle - Inclán y el fin de siglo . Eds . Luis Iglesias Feijoo , Margarita Santos Zas , Javier Serrano Alonso y Amparo de Juan Bolufer . Santiago de Compostela : Universidad de San- tiago de ...