Suchergebnisse

« 'Interrogating Secularism' is a call to rethink binary categories of "religion" and "secularism" in contemporary Arab American fiction and art. While most studies that explore the traffic between literature and issues of secularism emphasize how canonical texts naturalize and reinforce secular values, Interrogating Secularism approaches this nexus through novels written by and about ethnic and religious minorities. Haque juxtaposes accounts of secular experience in the writing of Arab Anglophone authors such as Mohja Kahf, Rabih Alameddine, Khaled Mattawa, Laila Lalami, and Rawi Hage, with Arab and Muslim artists such as Ninar Esber, Mounir Fatmi, Hasan Elahi, and Emily Jacir. Looking at multiple genres and modes of aesthetic production, including AIDS narratives, visual art, and digital media, Haque explores how their conventions are used to subvert the ideals tied to secularism and the various anxieties and investments that support secularism as a premise. These authors and artists critique Western iterations of secular thought in spaces such as art exhibits, airports, borders, and literary discourses to capture how the secularism thesis reproduces the exclusivity it intends to remedy. « (Verlagsbeschreibung)

This book argues that secularism and modernity are responsible for the identity crisis that minorities experience in India and Sri Lanka. It shows that content and aesthetics of minority writing are not only shaped by the impositions of secularism and modernity but also produces innovative strategies to overcome them.

""Secular criticism" is a term invented by Edward Said to denote, not a theory, but a practice that counters the tendency of much of modern thinking to reach for a transcendentalist comfort zone, the very space philosophy wrested away from religion in the name of modernity. Using this notion as a compass, this book reconfigures the recent secularism debates on an entirely different basis, by showing: 1) how the secular imagination is closely linked to society's radical poiesis, its capacity to imagine and create unprecedented forms of worldly existence; and 2) how the space of the secular animates the desire for a radical democratic politics that overturns inherited modes of subjugation, whether religious or secularist. Indeed, the point is to disrupt the co-dependent relation between the religious and the secular--hence, the rejection of fashionable languages of post-secularism--in order to engage in a double critique against heteronomous politics of all kinds. For Gourgouris, secular criticism is a form of political being, critical, anti-foundational, disobedient, anarchic, yet not negative for negation's sake, but creative of new forms of collective reflection, interrogation, and action, which alter not only the current terrain of dominant politics but the very self-conceptualization of what it means to be human. Written in free and combative style, as was the demand of the Sydney Library Lectures to "think out loud," and given both to close readings of texts and examinations of the broad horizon, these essays cover a range of issues, historical and philosophical, archaic and contemporary, literary and political that ultimately converge on the significance of contemporary radical politics--the assembly movements we have seen in various parts of the world in the last couple of years. The secular imagination demands a radical pedagogy and a great deal of unlearning established thought patterns. Its most important dimension is not battling religion per se, but dismantling theological politics of sovereignty in favor of creating radical conditions for social autonomy"--

A review essay of 5 books covering Turkish literature, Turkish nationalism, and Turkeys relationship with Europe.

There is a peculiar relationship between contemporary poetry and perspectives that are deemed to be heretical by conservative audiences. This relationship is not fully accounted for by current anthropological theories of the secular. The field of literature has been successfully studied as a secular institution – both in the sense of the differentiation of institutions as well as in the sense of the subordination of the religious to the political. Such secularity appears as a rather safe, less controversial way to claim the power of some human entities in relation to God. Some poetry, by contrast, may be accused of heresy or unbelief even when written with pious intention. This suggests a dimension to being secular that is more offensive to conservative societal sensibilities, as it contrasts with deeply-held views on the proper form of the God-human relationship and the associated imaginaries, languages, and aesthetics. Based on a combination of ethnographic research in historical context and a theoretical focus on aesthetics and imagination of divine power as a constituent of human lives, it is proposed in this article that in addition to looking at state power, institutions, and the creation of a secular aesthetic normality, it is also necessary to look more closely at issues of faith, including heretical faith.

This paper discusses how Philip Roth's The Counterlife uses metafiction to portray the plasticity of identities in a critical stance against exclusivist attitudes in nation-states. After an analysis of Roth's use of self-reflexivity, this research juxtaposes two conflicting accounts of nation-state by Roth and Anderson. Through this comparison, the paper puts forward that Roth's fiction continuously undermines unisonance in nation-state. This research highlights the significance of writing and self-referentiality in Roth's novel, as political tools of continuously reshaping not only identities but also identity categories in nation-states.

Our Fanatics: Figurations of Religious Fanaticism in Ian McEwan, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Marilynne Robinson examines how three contemporary novelists complicate oft-repeated accounts that oppose religious fanaticism to reasoned argumentation and secular politics. My dissertation features novels that focus intently on the interiority of protagonists who encounter figures of religious fanaticism, portraying religious fanaticism as something to be negotiated rather than defended against. By analyzing twenty-first century novels that variously figure religious fanaticism in oppositional, paradoxical, and genealogical terms, this project examines how religious fanaticism is constitutive of—rather than external to—the worlds of these novels.The first chapter reaches back to Ian McEwan's Enduring Love (1998), comparing it to his 9/11 novel, Saturday (2005), and, more recently, The Children Act (2014). I argue McEwan's novels frame religious fanaticism as a form of irrational certainty that generates epistemological uncertainty for the novels' protagonists. These texts frustrate a simple triumphant narrative whereby secular rationalism prevails over religious fanaticism. More recently, however, McEwan's fiction resolves such tensions with increasing authority, gradually eliminating the experimental dimensions of McEwan's early work. Chapter two features Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Purple Hibiscus (2003), which develops an apparently paradoxical religious fanatic— politically admirable but privately violent. I investigate this paradox by analyzing the novel's cyclical plot, which echoes the Catholic liturgical calendar and which distinguishes it from Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart (1958), a comparison that has dominated Adichie's critical reception. The third chapter reads Marilynne Robinson's Gilead trilogy—Gilead (2004), Home (2008), and Lila (2014)—as an extended meditation on the lingering effects of religious fanaticism across the generations of a small mid-Western town. The trilogy's genealogical figuration of religious fanaticism ties abolitionism to civil rights activism, delivering a resounding critique of "mainline" Protestant disavowals of such fanaticism.The religious fanatics that appear across this dissertation cannot be described in any easy sense as "ours." My title draws attention to the smaller, subtler way that these novels approach religious fanaticism through intimate relationships and private spaces, positioning religious fanaticism as internal to communities, to families, and, particularly in Adichie and Robinson, to Christian traditions.