The secularization thesis is dead. There is no doubt whatever about that. Over years that have begun to stretch into decades, through the work of a diverse array of scholars-from Talal Asad, José Casanova, Saba Mahmood, and Charles Taylor, down to Americanists like Tracy Fessenden, Toni Wall Jaudon, Kathryn Lofton, John Modern, and Michael Warner-the notion that something called "secularization" provides an adequate conceptual framework for the post-Enlightenment movement of bodies and belief, of thought and authority, has come under sustained and multidimensional assault. We have become, as the term goes, postsecular, to the degree we understand those assaults to have been, finally, cumulatively, fatal. It's a fairly noncontroversial position at this point, as stated by Asad way back in 2003: "If anything is agreed upon, it is that a straightforward narrative of progress from the religious to the secular is no longer acceptable" (2003, 1). Disenchantment, a swing from superstition to rationality, credulity to skepticism, eschatological fanaticism to liberal tolerance: ours is a scholarly moment no longer persuaded by the clarities of these stories of modernity, nor by the neat dichotomies nested within them. So the secularization thesis is dead. This must be distinctly understood. To be clear, this sense of the postsecular does not carry with it a particular historical claim, as opposed to the desecularization narrative recently offered by the chastened secularization theorist Peter Berger
Looking at Walt Whitman's Civil War writings—especially his memoir Memoranda during the War and his letters of consolation—this essay argues that Whitman discovered in the war a way to enlarge the vision of sex and sexual possibility he had initiated in the “Calamus” poems of 1860. Taking as a point of departure the babies named Walt that were born after the war to soldiers for whom Whitman had cared, the essay describes the multiplicity of roles the poet inhabits in the war writing (mother, father, nurse, lover, confidant, scribe) and reads his acts of surrogacy as efforts to restore carnality, in its world-making force, to family and, in particular, to parenthood. Whitman's project of queer generation, the essay argues, usefully complicates recent scholarship on sex, time, and futurity.
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Peter Coviello is assistant professor of English at Bowdoin College. His essays have appeared in American Literature, Early American Literature,Studies in American Fiction, and elsewhere. His book Intimacy in America: Dreams of Affiliation in Antebellum Literature is forthcoming.
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