Download E-books Blasphemous Modernism: The 20th-Century Word Made Flesh (Modernist Literature and Culture) PDF

By Steve Pinkerton

Scholars have lengthy defined modernism as "heretical" or "iconoclastic" in its attacks on secular traditions of shape, style, and decorum. but critics have paid unusually little recognition to the comparable type of blasphemy--the rhetoric of spiritual offense--and to the categorical methods this rhetoric operates in, and as, literary modernism. United through a shared dedication to "the note made flesh," writers akin to James Joyce, Mina Loy, Richard Bruce Nugent, and Djuna Barnes made blasphemy a key part of their modernist perform, profaning the very scriptures and sacraments that fueled their paintings. In doing in order that they belied T. S. Eliot's verdict that the forces of secularization had rendered blasphemy out of date in an more and more godless century ("a international within which blasphemy is impossible"); their made up our minds irreverence unearths, satirically, the level to which faith persisted as a cultural strength after the dying of God. extra, their transgressions highlight a politics of faith that has seldom engaged the eye of modernist stories. Blasphemy respects no department of church and nation, and neither do the writers who wield it to profane all demeanour of coercive dogmas--including ecclesiastical in addition to extra worldly ideologies of race, classification, kingdom, empire, gender, and sexuality. The late-century instance of Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses presents, eventually, an indication of ways modernism persists in postwar anglophone literature and of the severe position blasphemy performs in that endurance. Blasphemous Modernism therefore resonates with the wider cultural and ideological issues that during contemporary years have enriched the scope of modernist scholarship.

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