Making Room for Spirituality Within Postmodern Literature

 

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.

These historical, cultural, and literary conversations leave two questions. First, what is the future of postmodernism given its problematic stance on religion? And second, what is the future of religion, given the persuading postmodern