Blasphemous Modernism: The 20th-Century Word Made Flesh (Modernist Literature and Culture) - Hardcover

Pinkerton, Steve

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0190627565 ISBN 13: 9780190627560

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2017

Synopsis

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 determined irreverence reveals, ironically, the extent to which 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.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

"Steve Pinkerton's Blasphemous Modernism is an important study of modernist writers' continuing engagement with religion in the early twentieth century -- an era that is sometimes anachronistically treated as totally secularized. Pinkerton shows how writers from the mainstream and the margins of the modernist movement attacked religion because they took it so seriously. This impressive work has significant implications for our current cultural scene, in which accusations of blasphemy continue to have real-world consequences." (Pericles Lewis, Yale University)
 
"At last! An intuitive and probing analysis of blasphemy and modernist writers, skillfully accomplished by exploring the real-world context of their works. This penetrating and lucid book pries apart the fundamental paradox of blasphemy within the modernist epoch -- that the most forthright blasphemy effectively reinforces the power of the sacred over the imagination in a supposedly godless age." (David Nash, Oxford Brookes University)

About the Author:

Steve Pinkerton teaches writing and literature at Case Western Reserve University.

About this edition

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 0190627565
• ISBN 13: 9780190627560
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 200