Glasses brilliant: Religion in the American Postmodern novel

Many English scholars hope to move beyond Postmodernism, to negate its irritating ineffable and reunite their ethical, aesthetic perceptions with a priori rational principles. My dissertation is an alternative to their quests, one affirming their cherished ethical aesthetics in the Postmodernism they deem quietist if not relativist. It examines the practice, exploration, and expansion of those aesthetics in American postmodern novels engaging the religion and religious themes some detractors and supporters of Postmodernism consider anathema to it. The authors of these novels counter this sentiment by drawing on and merging religion's and Postmodernism's tendencies to contest the sovereignty and supremacy of secular dictates and privilege the ineffable over the materially certain. Both America and the Bakhtinian novel are friendly, fertile spaces for this activity. America is exemplarily postmodern, the excoriated site of instant commodification for instant gratification immersed in a multi-cultural blend of traditional cultures, ethics, and aesthetics. America's religions are significant parts of this blend; they unite many of its vital customs, rituals, and spiritual gestures with American capitalism's own mystical set of codes and mores. In this confluence I and the authors I examine do not produce rigid principles determining and steering definitions of Modernism and Postmodernism. However, there we do find and present mutable spectrums of Modernism and Postmodernism, which enable mutable definitions of those dynamics concerning ethics, aesthetics, and subjectivity.; I had initially thought that my theoretical lens in this project would resemble John Caputo's brilliant fusion of religious and Post-structuralist ones. However, the theorists I found most conducive to and in sync with the novelists' and my own investigations were those existentialists and phenomenologists navigating traditional theology's and “traditional” Post-structuralism's fringes. For example, in Chapter Two Philip K. Dick splices Gnostic existentialism and capitalist fragmentation through his “demiurges without organs,” his selves and others mediating the creator and creature positions while receiving the divine knowledge they both disseminate and obscure. In Chapter Three, Catholic authors mingle the divine truth of body and blood with the immanent flaws of temporal perception. Chapter Four examines Jewish Postmodern novelists coupling their romantic aesthetic perceptions of their Jewish identities/selves with the traditional communal ones they neither revere nor reject. In Chapter Five Toni Morrison's Beloved situates and complicates subjectivity through mingling spaces of African and Christian spirit and ideology, and the particular perceptions affected by inhabiting them.