Literature, Religion, and the Secular: Cultural Perspectives for English Literary Studies through a Reading of Postsecular Theory

About

In this course we will conduct a study of the relationship between religion and literature from the perspective of Postsecular Studies, with close attention to the religious context from within which key works of British literature were produced. Students will explore the primary insights of 'Postecular Theory' as a recent well-established field of critical inquiry in Western academia, learning how the capitalist and colonial construction of the ‘religious-secular’ binary needs to be dismantled through close literary readings, often conducted from a postcolonial perspective. To understand the relationship between religion and literature, we will study the entire trajectory of English literature from the eighteenth to the twenty first century with case studies from different contexts—eighteenth-century Gothic literature, Victorian New Woman fiction, nineteenth-century scientific romances, Victorian Gothic, colonial (Anglo-Indian) fiction, and modern graphic novels— asking repeatedly how concepts of ‘religiosity’ and ‘secularism’ were often being sculpted from within imperialist and capitalist paradigms with a disregard for alternative templates of faith and meaning. Students will learn how an informed postsecular reading of literary texts can help us question Western post-Enlightenment constructions of ‘secular’ identities—identifying the inherent exploitative violence of neoliberal ‘secularism’ while also resisting the influx of violent exclusionary 'faith'-based discourses. The course will also examine in detail the critiques of postsecular theory that have questioned its tendency to obfuscate the crucial question of human rights in its centering of religious vocabularies.

The topics covered include:

● The representation of religion in English literary texts from the late eighteenth century to contemporary times

● The field of postsecular theory (Undoing the ‘Secularization Thesis’)

● Critiques of postsecular theory

● Rise of the Novel with the…