Secularization without End

Vincent P. Pecora

Description

In Secularization without End: Beckett, Mann, Coetzee, Vincent P. Pecora elaborates an alternative history of the twentieth-century Western novel that explains the resurgence of Christian theological ideas. Standard accounts of secularization in the novel assume the gradual disappearance of religious themes through processes typically described as rationalization: philosophy and science replace faith. Pecora shows, however, that in the modern novels he examines, "secularization" ceases to mean emancipation from the prescientific ignorance or enchantment commonly associated with belief and signifies instead the shameful state of a humanity bereft of grace and undeserving of redemption.

His book focuses on the unpredictable and paradoxical rediscovery of theological perspectives in otherwise secular novels after 1945. The narratives he analyzes are all seemingly godless in their overt points of view, from Samuel Beckett’s Murphy to Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus to J. M. Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus. But, Pecora argues, these novels wind up producing varieties of religious doctrine drawn from Augustinian and Calvinist claims about primordial guilt and the impotence of human will. In the most artfully imaginative ways possible, Beckett, Mann, and Coetzee resist the apparently inevitable plot that so many others have constructed for the history of the novel, by which human existence is reduced to mundane and meaningless routines and nothing more. Instead, their writing invokes a religious past that turns secular modernity, and the novel itself, inside out.

Sujets

• Religion
• Christianisme
• Literary Criticism
• 20th Century
• Modern
• HISTORY
• Doktor Faustus
• Christian theology
• Doctor Faustus (Thomas Mann novel)
• Modern history
• General officer
• Augustinians
• Theory
• Semiotics
• Calvinism
• Christianity
• General
• Murphy
• Obermodern-Zutzendorf
• Thomas Mann
• J. M. Coetzee
• Samuel Beckett

Informations

• Publié par: University of Notre Dame Press
• Date de parution: 15 mars 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780268089900
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

The Yusko Ward-Phillips Lectures in English Language and Literature
SECULARIZATION WITHOUT END
BECKETT, MANN, COETZEE
Vincent P. Pecora
University of Notre Dame Press
Notre Dame, Indiana
Copyright © 2015 by the University of Notre Dame
Notre Dame, Indiana 46556
undpress.nd.edu
All Rights Reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Pecora, Vincent P., 1953– Secularization without End: Beckett, Mann, Coetzee / Vincent P. Pecora. pages cm. — (The Yusko Ward-Phillips Lectures in English Language and Literature) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-268-03899-1 (pbk.: alk. paper) ISBN 0-268-03899-6 (pbk.: alk. paper) -->
E-ISBN 978-0-268-08990-0 1. Fiction—20th century—History and criticism. 2. Secularism in literature. 3. Religion and literature. 4. Secularization (Theology)—History—20th century. I. Title. PN3351.P43 2015 809’.93382—dc23 2014047516 ∞ The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. -->
This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [e-mail]
For
OLIVIA AND AVA
When man has been taught that no good thing remains in his power, and that he is hedged about on all sides by most miserable necessity, in spite of this he should nevertheless be instructed to aspire to a good of which he is empty, to a freedom of which he has been deprived.
—J OHN C ALVIN
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Secularization and the History of the Novel
CHAPTER ONE Martin Heidegger, John Calvin, and Samuel Beckett
CHAPTER TWO Thomas Mann, Augustine, and the “Death of God”
CHAPTER THREE The Ambivalent Puritan: J. M. Coetzee
Conclusion: Reading in the Afterlife of the Novel
Notes
Bibliography Index -->
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book began with an invitation to give the Ward-Phillips Lectures for 2013, hosted by the English Department at the University of Notre Dame. I am deeply grateful for the opportunity to deliver the lectures that became this volume. I owe special thanks to Elliott Visconsi, who conveyed the invitation and patiently worked through possible topics with me; to David Wayne Thomas, who was a splendid host during my time at Notre Dame; to Henry Weinfield, who proved to be an astute and indefatigable interlocutor, and who forced me to sharpen my argument; and to the many faculty members and graduate students who generously offered comments on my presentations. I benefitted from the chance to deliver a nascent version of the chapter on Samuel Beckett to the English Department at the University of California, Los Angeles, for which I must thank Ali Behdad; I am also grateful to Michael North, who offered insightful queries about my approach to Beckett’s work, and to Debora Shuger, whose long support for my engagement with questions of religion and secularization is something I hold dear. Jon Snyder kindly invited me to present an even earlier and less developed version of the project to the Department of Italian and French and the Department of Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. I am especially indebted to Jon and Lucia Re, whose hospitality is second to none, and to Enda Duffy, who convinced me (perhaps inadvertently) that J. M. Coetzee needed to be part of what I was trying to say. Kathryn Stelmach Artuso gave me the opportunity to present the introduction and key parts of later chapters to the Western Regional Conference on Christianity and Literature at Westmont College, where the response was astute, challenging, and very enjoyable, and where I benefitted especially from Kevin Seidel’s provocative questions. Nancy Ruttenberg invited me to take part in a conference at the Center for the Study of the Novel at Stanford University, where I presented an early draft of my introduction, and where Franco Moretti graciously responded with a simple question that forced me to think more deliberately about how to approach the nature of religious belief in the novel. This conference also allowed me to learn much from conversations with Derek Attridge, whose work has been of singular importance to the study of Coetzee. Robert Hudson invited me to give a lecture at the Generative Anthropology Summer Conference at Westminster College, where I presented another very early version of my first chapter and benefitted from the give-and-take with Eric Gans and many others. Bruce Robbins invited me to join a panel at a meeting of the Society for Novel Studies. His comments, along with those of fellow panelist Simon During, were very helpful in rethinking my general approach. Nancy Armstrong’s support at this time was also very welcome. Finally, I must thank Susan Hegeman, who asked me for an entry on the topic of religion for The Encyclopedia of the Novel (Blackwell, 2010), an entry that became the intellectual seed for the introduction to this book.
The entire manuscript received superb readings from the two reviewers for Notre Dame Press, Thomas Pfau and Russell Berman. Their careful attention to the details of my argument, and especially their learned advice concerning the chapter on Thomas Mann, improved the manuscript immeasurably. Scott Black, a colleague in the University of Utah English Department, offered important advice on my treatment of Cervantes. I must also thank Stephen Little, acquisitions editor at Notre Dame Press, for his enormous help in guiding the project through the early stages; Kellie M. Hultgren, whose remarkable attention to the text in the copy-editing phase—and in several languages—has saved me from much embarrassment; Wendy McMillen, whose intelligence and patience in working out the design of the book are greatly appreciated; and Rebecca R. DeBoer, the managing editor for the project.
Not least, I want to thank my students in two classes at the University of Utah—an undergraduate senior seminar on Samuel Beckett and J. M. Coetzee, and a graduate seminar on the idea of political theology and allegory that concluded with Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus —for their contributions to this book. They asked questions I had not considered, pointed to telling details that I very much needed to address, and generally demonstrated a level of engagement with the novels of Beckett and Coetzee that challenged me to be clearer and more precise, but also told me that there might be even more going on in the novels than I had initially imagined. After all this help, the flaws that remain in the book are entirely of my own devising.
Finally, I must thank the University of Utah, which generously provided me with a year’s sabbatical during the book’s composition.
Introduction
Secularization and the History of the Novel
When future generations of scholars look back at the last half of the twentieth century, they may conclude that it was less an era when formalism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, and new historicism competed with one another for intellectual credibility than an age in which the secular criticism of literary texts rose to dominance. They may also conclude that this secular approach to literature accounts in large part for the emergence of the novel as the most salient and significant object of literary interpretation in the academy. For surely, during this period, no literary genre came to exemplify the advent of secular society and culture more fully than did the novel, and no elaboration of the meaning of secular society and culture was complete without careful consideration of the novel. It would be no exaggeration to say that if the last half of the twentieth century began with Ian Watt’s claim, in The Rise of the Novel , that the novel was one of the most important products of secular society, we have now arrived at the far more remarkable claim that modern secular society is itself the product of the novel. In Love’s Knowledge , Martha Nussbaum reads the genre primarily as an elaboration of secular moral philosophy. 1 And in the first chapter of Inventing Human Rights , Lynn Hunt locates the beginnings of human empathy itself—somewhat surprisingly for anyone familiar with the great world religions—in books such as Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1747–48). 2 Given so Eurocentric an approach, one can only wonder how the Arabs, the Indians, and the Chinese survived for so long without empathy while they waited for a translation of Clarissa to be smuggled across the borders. The result is what David Foster Wallace, when not writing about the Jesuit substitute teacher for the Advanced Tax course at DePaul University who describes the analytical concentration needed for “real-world accounting” as nothing short of “heroism,” might have called “the teeming wormball of data and rule and exception and contingency” that makes modern interpretation of the novel something akin to the interpretation of modernity itself. 3
This book is instead about what I would call the afterlife of the novel, the word afterlife here meaning (a) the novel’s current belatedness as a secular, realistic literary form (it lost the ability to compete in terms of realism with cinema in the 1930s and television in the 1950s, and newer electronic media, including electronic literatures, have made the genre seem all the more quaint) and (b) the lively re-emergence within the novel of certain, supposedly forgotten, religious discourses that become legible by means of—indeed, I will claim because of—the secular trajectory of the prose that is its vehicle. Such an afterlife is not a neatly circumscribable period of literary history; it has no obvious beginning point. If one must identify a progenitor, Franz Kafka will do. But the authors found at the heart of this book are all exemplary manifestations of a profound and almost inh