A01=Amy Hungerford
American civil religion
American Freedom and Catholic Power
Author_Amy Hungerford
Bible
Biblical authority
Bildungsroman
Category=DSBH
Catholicism
Charismatic Movement
Child of God
Christian right
Conversion narrative
Cotton Mather
Criticism
Death of God theology
Dick and Jane
Disenchantment
Don DeLillo
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eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Excommunication
Garry Wills
Geoffrey Hartman
Glossolalia
God
God is dead
Humanae vitae
J. L. Austin
Jacques Derrida
Jews
John Barth
Judeo-Christian
Kabbalah
Kenneth Burke
Left Behind
Literary modernism
Literature
M. H. Abrams
Mircea Eliade
Narcissism
Narrative
New Criticism
Novel
On Religion
Paul Blanshard
Pentecostalism
Poetry
Pope Pius XII
Postmodernism
Predestination
Protestantism
Puritans
Religion
Religious experience
Religious text
Romanticism
Scholasticism
Secularism
Secularization
Self-Reliance
Sinner's prayer
Spirituality
Superiority (short story)
The American Religion
The Heresy of Paraphrase
The Philosopher
The Righteous Men
Theodicy
Theology
Venial sin
Violence and the Sacred
Walter J. Ong
Wichita Vortex Sutra
Writing
Product details
- ISBN 9780691145754
- Weight: 340g
- Dimensions: 152 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 21 Jul 2010
- Publisher: Princeton University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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How can intense religious beliefs coexist with pluralism in America today? Examining the role of the religious imagination in contemporary religious practice and in some of the best-known works of American literature from the past fifty years, Postmodern Belief shows how belief for its own sake--a belief absent of doctrine--has become an answer to pluralism in a secular age. Amy Hungerford reveals how imaginative literature and religious practices together allow novelists, poets, and critics to express the formal elements of language in transcendent terms, conferring upon words a religious value independent of meaning. Hungerford explores the work of major American writers, including Allen Ginsberg, Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy, Toni Morrison, and Marilynne Robinson, and links their unique visions to the religious worlds they touch. She illustrates how Ginsberg's chant-infused 1960s poetry echoes the tongue-speaking of Charismatic Christians, how DeLillo reimagines the novel and the Latin Mass, why McCarthy's prose imitates the Bible, and why Morrison's fiction needs the supernatural.
Uncovering how literature and religion conceive of a world where religious belief can escape confrontations with other worldviews, Hungerford corrects recent efforts to discard the importance of belief in understanding religious life, and argues that belief in belief itself can transform secular reading and writing into a religious act. Honoring the ways in which people talk about and practice religion, Postmodern Belief highlights the claims of the religious imagination in twentieth-century American culture.
Amy Hungerford is professor of English at Yale University. She is the author of "The Holocaust of Texts: Genocide, Literature, and Personification".
