CMPL 342 - Religion and Disenchantment in 20th-century Literature

FC ARHU WINT

4 credits
How is religion imagined in modern literature? In what ways has literature itself become a species of religious thought? This course explores how 20th-century literature reflects a crisis of meaning in modern religious thought, on the one hand, and how it sustains the religious through attachment to form, to loss, and to belief without meaning, on the other. We will read writers (Baldwin, Morrison, O’Connor, Endo, Camus, amongst others) with both direct and oblique relationships to religious discourses and institutions. We will examine notions of forgiveness, martyrdom, apostasy, idolatry, and love together with social themes of race, class, and gender.
This course is cross-listed with RELG 342