"The Secular" as Opposed to What?

Abstract

For all its unfashionable teleological inevitability, its brash aspirations to universality, the story of advancing secularization remains the one progress narrative to which professional literary study typically attaches its own discourses and aims. Michael Kaufmann urges literary scholars to bring critical scrutiny to bear on the ostensibly closed (if embattled) narrative of secularization in the interest of revisiting normative assumptions that have shaped and constrained the development of professional identity. Underscoring Kaufmann's call, Fessenden looks beyond the institutional grounding of literary studies to consider broader political consequences of leaving the religion/secular binary unexamined and undisturbed. In particular, she notes the problematic deference religion receives when its relation to the secular is mapped onto a familiar liberal model of private and public domains.

Toward a Postsecular Eighteenth Century

“…Michael Kaufmann's influential 2007 essay, “The Religious, the Secular, and Literary Studies: Rethinking the Secularization Narrative in Histories of the Profession,” traces our institutional indebtedness to the narrative of secularization and its confidence in a public discourse based on “scientific evidence, objective reason, and disciplined methodology” (607). Some scholars have argued that religion is so closely tied to literary studies that critics find it difficult to take religion as an object of study (Fessenden ), and the story of the foundation of the discipline of literary studies in biblical hermeneutics is well known (Jasper). In 2008, Viswanathan identified a “scholarly complicity” in “homogenizing religious history” that limits our ability to move forward (475), and this continues to be largely the case, especially in eighteenth‐century British literary studies.…”

Victorian Literature, Religion, and Secularization

“…The key point for us, however, is that Arnold’s “replacement theory” also affords a narrative of self‐legitimation for the field of English studies as it emerges at the end of the nineteenth century, a narrative so closely linked to the discipline that it can be very hard to untangle. As Tracy Fessenden puts it, “of all the binaries to which . .…”

In the letter of mere reason: Rethinking the universal secular intellectual with Immanuel Kant, Jacques Derrida and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

“…3 This threefold question of response-ability, accountability and authority subtends numerous lines of expressly deconstructive or otherwise theoretical enquiry into the role and future of the university at large, of its faculties and disciplines, and especially of the humanities. 4 With verve and import, these studies not only dovetail with historical scholarship on the rise of various disciplines, 5 but they also interface with scholarship on the ascendance of the secular university (Marsden and Longfield 1992;Marsden 1994;Masuzawa 2011Masuzawa , 2012; on the prominence of non-religious, academically trained intellectuals (Robbins 1993;Marsden 1997;Masuzawa 2011Masuzawa , 2012; on the development, theoretical framework and ideological bearings of religious studies and (no longer by extension) theology within the secular university (Wiebe 1991(Wiebe , 1994(Wiebe , 1999McCutcheon 1997McCutcheon , 2001Fitzgerald 2000;Kippenberg 2002;Roberts 2005;Masuzawa 2005;Pritchard 2010;Wildman 2010); on the relation between the secularisation thesis and the emergence of cultural criticism and literary studies (Pecora 2006;Kaufmann 2007;Fessenden 2007aFessenden , 2007bFessenden , 2010Viswanathan 2008); on historical, anthropological, philosophical, political, sociological, feminist and interdisciplinary conceptions and genealogies of religion and secularism (Asad 1993(Asad , 2003During 2002During , 2010Bhargava 2005;Mahmood 2005;Anidjar 2006Anidjar , 2009…”