Free eBooks Postmodern Belief: American Literature And Religion Since 1960 (20/21) Available To Downloads
How can intense religious beliefs coexist with pluralism in America today? Examining the role of the religious imagination in contemporary religious practice and in some of the best-known works of American literature from the past fifty years, Postmodern Belief shows how belief for its own sake--a belief absent of doctrine--has become an answer to pluralism in a secular age. Amy Hungerford reveals how imaginative literature and religious practices together allow novelists, poets, and critics to express the formal elements of language in transcendent terms, conferring upon words a religious value independent of meaning. Hungerford explores the work of major American writers, including Allen Ginsberg, Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy, Toni Morrison, and Marilynne Robinson, and links their unique visions to the religious worlds they touch. She illustrates how Ginsberg's chant-infused 1960s poetry echoes the tongue-speaking of Charismatic Christians, how DeLillo reimagines the novel and the Latin Mass, why McCarthy's prose imitates the Bible, and why Morrison's fiction needs the supernatural. Uncovering how literature and religion conceive of a world where religious belief can escape confrontations with other worldviews, Hungerford corrects recent efforts to discard the importance of belief in understanding religious life, and argues that belief in belief itself can transform secular reading and writing into a religious act. Honoring the ways in which people talk about and practice religion, Postmodern Belief highlights the claims of the religious imagination in twentieth-century American culture.
Series: 20/21
Paperback: 240 pages
Publisher: Princeton University Press (July 21, 2010)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 069114575X
ISBN-13: 978-0691145754
Product Dimensions: 6.1 x 0.6 x 9.2 inches
Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
Best Sellers Rank: #922,422 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #111 in Books > Literature & Fiction > History & Criticism > Movements & Periods > Postmodernism #3117 in Books > Literature & Fiction > History & Criticism > Regional & Cultural > United States #7722 in Books > Literature & Fiction > History & Criticism > Criticism & Theory
After thoroughly enjoying her Yale OpenCourse on the post-1945 American novel, I was compelled to purchase this book. As I anticipated from her lectures, Hungerford's analyses in this book are brilliant, explained with a refined but human eloquence. What I most enjoy about reading/hearing Hungerford's analysis of literature is the very "literariness" of her own language. Her ability to write academic prose that can be described to be as "beautiful" as it is scholarly is quite remarkable.
I initially became "turned on" to Amy after watching her series of recorded U-tube lectures. All I want to say is her insight and intellectual presentation is (imho) simply fascinating. If you're interested in modern American Literature, for that matter literature (.), buy this book.
I only read the chapter on Cormac McCarthy and Toni Morrison, "The Bible and Illiterature," but that was quite enough. Redundant, silly, inane. Hungerford writes of "literary mysticism, to find a way of believing without doctrine, to craft a belief without meaning." Of Blood Meridian: "Blood Meridian is designed to make us feel, above all, like God is speaking, but to leave us in possession only of the unreadable aesthetic object, like the illiterate kid clutching his Bible." If this is true of McCarthy's fiction, then why would someone want to read his unreadable illiterature? More shopworn postmodern lit-crit draff.
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