| For two thousand years, Western literature has given us conversion narratives, stories recounting the moment the protagonist "turns round," the translation of the Latin convertere from which we get conversion. In the West, these stories have a long history in and association with Christianity, so this dissertation begins with a simple question: what happens to the conversion narrative in modernity, where Christianity no longer has a "taken-for-granted" status, to use Peter Berger's phrase, and becomes "one system among others," to use Niklas Luhman's? To answer this question, this study closely examines the works of Kate Chopin, Flannery O'Connor, and Toni Morrison, writers chosen because they each produce modern conversion narratives---some religious, some secular---and because they provocatively engage with the larger project behind this study, mapping the landscape of religion and secularism in modernity.; In part, this landscape looks like the work of Kate Chopin, a woman raised Catholic, who leaves the specifics of doctrine as an adult and combines her religious temperament with readings in Ralph Waldo Emerson and Charles Darwin to form an idiosyncratic, syncretic religion of one, ignoring binaries of religion and science, spirit and matter. It looks like the work of Flannery O'Connor, a writer whose Christian faith never wanes and who instead spends her writing career critiquing the secularism of her culture, embodied, for her, in such figures as Emerson, Sigmund Freud, and Carl Jung. And, finally, it looks like the work of Toni Morrison, an author who combines her sense of writing from "a nonsecular space" with her sense of being a black woman in a racist, patriarchal culture. The conversion of many of her characters, then, is a conversion of racial consciousness, a transformation that for the author carries religious import. Modernity has not led to secularism, as once thought it would, but has led to a pluralism of systems rubbing against and vying with one another. This study theorizes a literary genre and uses that genre to approach these three writers in a different manner in order to open out to the larger project of delineating this pluralism. |
