We are living in postmodern times.
Within a postmodern
theoretical framework, there are no absolute truths because truth is considered
a social construct based on historical moments and cultural contexts. According
to this logic, everything we know is based on the social context in which we
live. Currently, academic disciples from ethnic studies to philosophy to art
are influenced by postmodern theory.
In postmodern literary
theory, the traditional interpretation maintains an incompatibility between
religion and literature based on the theory’s dismantling of universals and
absolute truths. Since religion claims to have dogmas and doctrines, it is at
odds with postmodernism.
Yet in the academy and in
the real world, spirituality remains ever-present. In spite of the rise of
secularism, publicity on disagreements with the Catholic Church, and the
replacement of Genesis with evolution, theological concerns and mystical experiences
continue to be relevant and to have significance for many people.
In the late twentieth
century and early twenty-first, theorists observed a reemergence of existential
and spiritual questions in American literature, marking a transition that continues
today. This return of theological dialogue within literary works disrupts the
assumed incompatibility between religion and literature and marks fiction and
nonfiction as a location for exploring spiritual themes. The rise of religious
discourse in literature suggests that either traditional interpretations of
postmodernism have significant shortcomings insofar as they do not account for
religious questions or that there is a shift within the theory in which there
is a renewed interest in religious themes within postmodernity. In the latter,
postmodernism could provide tools for religious questions regarding faith,
institution, and truth.
There are many literary
texts within this movement that engage in religious and existential dialogues within postmodern frameworks. Some
authors who have been credited as postmodernists writing about religious themes
include Toni Morrison, Allen Ginsberg, Don DeLillo, and bell hooks, to name a
few. These writers are informed by postmodern concepts of race, gender,
existentialism, and subjectivity and apply them to religious issues. This
movement within the literary tradition to incorporate religious topics and
themes in a postmodern era suggests excluding religious dialogue ignores the
religious and existential impulse and the influence of religious traditions on
culture and history.
Within the creative genre
of literature, a postmodern theoretical framework can provide tools that help
construct a critique of traditional ideas of God in search of existential
meaning beyond human institutions. By utilizing the postmodern idea of
decentering universals, literary works can create a new dialogue about religion
and religious traditions that participates in a theoretical, literary, and
cultural transition in the second half of the twentieth century.
Theorists who have
contributed to this conversation include the oft-credited founder of
postmodernism, Jacques Derrida (pictured), whose “theological turn” in Acts of Religion explored religious questions regarding truth and
the aporia between the empirical and the transcendental. Additionally, Pericles
Lewis suggests in Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel that literature began replacing institutional
religion in the middle of the twentieth century by reimagining religion and
abstracting spiritual truths from tradition. Amy Hungerford argues that in a
pluralist and postmodern era, meaninglessness is resolved in literature. She
borrows Graham Ward’s phrase “postmodern theology” to suggest that
characteristics of the theory can be valuably applied to religion in literature
in order to revise dominant religious paradigms. Feminist theologians and third
wave feminists who are informed by postmodernism, from Mary McClintock
Fulkerson to Luce Irigaray, pioneer the reimagination of traditional
patriarchal religion and disrupt assumed religious universals of God the Father
and the masculine trinity.
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