UC Berkeley

Recently, disciplines such as religious studies, anthropology, and sociology have been revolutionized by an interrogation of the secularization narrative and of the secular more generally in light of its dialectical relationship with “religion.” Literary studies, however, has undertaken less disciplinary self-examination. As a result, literary texts are often still analyzed based on uncritical assumptions about religion and the secular: that which is “modern,” “Western,” and “a-religious” is presumed secular, while the postcolonial and diasporic becomes the site of that which is named “religion.” “The Secular Undone: Contemporary Anglo-American Literature and the Question of Time” challenges this binary mode of reading and criticism by revealing what I term a postsecular sensibility in contemporary Anglo-American literature. Such a sensibility works to deconstruct the secular-religious binary, troubling the oppositions that secularism erects. This sensibility, I argue, is evinced in textual forms whose temporalities cannot be reduced to what is often considered to be the homogeneous empty time of secular modernity. Deploying a postsecular formalism, I thus examine formal structures that are mobilized beyond the rubric of the secular, and that necessitate or engender a complex multitude of temporalities. Reading such forms beyond secularism’s structuring antinomies reveals impulses, forms of life, and modes of being that demand conceptualization beyond a “return of the religious” or “secularity.”

The Secular Undone analyzes works by Cormac McCarthy, J.D. Salinger, Ben Lerner, Maggie Nelson, Fred Moten, Anne Carson, and Ariana Reines. Each chapter considers a formal structure, or what I call “forms under pressure”: forms that variously respond to and are shaped by the pressures of their presents, whether of neoliberalism, of climate catastrophe, or of a secularism that seeks to conscript them. In each chapter, I seek to uncover a text’s postsecular sensibility as it has gone unnoticed by critical scholarship, as well as to consider how each text’s form mobilizes and engenders its sensibility. In other words, I examine how form creates affective discursive effects as well as temporalities that exceed and collapse the notion of homogenous empty time traditionally associated with the secular modern. In Chapter One, I argue that the allegorical form of McCarthy’s The Road generates a space of disjunctive repetition and reiteration that allows the novel to retain a sense of tentative “ongoingness” against the apocalyptic vision of non-futurity its landscape seems to impose throughout. Here, allegory mobilizes a temporality beyond the teleological or the so-called “secular modern,” offering, through its fragments and figures, a time both recursive and cumulative. In Chapter Two, I explore how the metafictional form of both Salinger’s Franny and Zooey and Lerner’s 10:04 ungrounds the secular-religious binary by destabilizing the supposedly stable subject—author, narrator, protagonist—of secularism and religion. Here I consider how the postsecular sensibility I identify emerges as simultaneously a product of and reaction to neoliberalism. In Chapter Three, I read Nelson’s Bluets and Moten’s All That Beauty, uncovering in them serial structures that, in the case of the former, stage the dissolution of the subject, and in the case of the latter, function as rupture and undoing-towards-flesh. Such serial forms complicate the standard account of modern time—as well as the standard account of the serial—as homogeneous and empty. Chapter Four explores what I term “the elliptical,” a form that encompasses the use of omissions, silences, and blanks, in Carson’s Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera and Reines’s A Sand Book. I read both works alongside the Kabbalistic notion of tsimtsum, tracing how the texts play with ellipsis and the processual expansion of divine absence in a subversion of the standard account of secular modernity as the moment of God’s evacuation from the world. While Carson turns to the elliptical and to that which language cannot capture, Reines moves from decreation to creation, transforming the elliptical into a kind of prophetic speech.