Why the Postsecular Matters

Abstract

Summer Seminar for faculty, titled "Postsecular Studies and the Rise of the English Novel, 1719-1897." The germ of our seminar was simple. We are scholars who work on eighteenth-and nineteenth-century British literature, and we edit monograph series in religion, literature, and postsecular studies. In our experience, scholars in our fields have yet to take up the insights of postsecular scholarship in meaningful ways. By and large, their stories still cast the novel as the handmaid of secularization, reworking the well-worn plot of religion's decline rather than of its complex transformation and shape-shifting nature in modernity. We wanted to lead a seminar that gave faculty a chance to read postsecular scholarship from many disciplines alongside canonical and lesser-well-known novels from Robinson Crusoe to Dracula, tuning our ears to hear other possibilities about the migrations of religion and secularism in these narratives. The term "postsecular" continues to be used in a variety of ways that are important to distinguish. In Post-Secular Philosophy (1998) Philip Blond used it to describe a "Radical Orthodox" theological orientation. For Jürgen Habermas the postsecular is a political designation for a European society no longer homogenously secular and grappling to integrate religious citizens in the public sphere. For scholars in our discipline, it is often a literary-historical term borrowed from John McClure's Partial Faiths: Postsecular Fiction in the Age of Pynchon and Morrison (2007), identifying select post-WWII literature more occupied with faith and spirituality than the modernist fiction that preceded it. In framing our seminar, we used the term "postsecular" primarily in a fourth sense, as shorthand for

Religion Counts: Faithful Realism and Historical Representation in George Eliot’s Romola

“…Both readings foreground, in secular terms, the importance of affect and attachment in literary criticism on the Victorian novel. Recent developments in postcritical reading share much in common with postsecular criticism, and further discussions between the emerging fields show great potential for rethinking the role of faith in literary studies and the humanities (see Branch 2016;Branch and Knight 2018;Felski 2016;Pecora 2016;Wickman 2022).…”

“…Romola both imagines Renaissance Florence as an era of performative faith and models its historical realism as an act of faith. Building on a recent postsecular analysis of the rise of the novel (Branch and Knight 2018), I rethink in the following paragraphs the secular framing of key theories of the Victorian realist novel in postsecular terms.…”

“In the Way of the Gift”: The Postsecular Conditions of Grace in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead

“…Instead, as I will use the term, postsecularism refers more broadly to rethinking the conditions of possibility for all forms of belief, without relying on teleologies of recovery or loss. See, for example, Branch and Knight (2018). 2 For example, see Coviello and Hickman (2014), who identify three different approaches to postsecularism, which they suggest depart more or less from Taylor's historical narrative of secularity.…”