Civil religions, secular faiths: Improvised belief and nationhood in contemporary American fiction.

摘要

Despite a growing interest among literary critics in representations of religion and spiritual practice in twentieth-century and contemporary American fiction, less attention has been given to those practices that are improvised, unsanctioned, and not associated with established faith traditions. Through my readings of invented forms of spiritual expression in the work of five major contemporary American novelists---Louise Erdrich, Toni Morrison, Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, and Cormac McCarthy---I argue that the invented, individualized forms of spiritual expression in recent fiction not only interrogate the nature of belief in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, but also the quasi-religious character of nationhood and civic belonging, especially during periods of anxiety over what constitutes "American" national identity. In particular, these writers' adaptations and revisions of existing religious and spiritual practices, in my reading, is closely connected to their depictions of the failures of the national promise of American exceptionalism. As I hope to show in this dissertation, greater attention to the prominent role of improvised and unstructured religious and spiritual practices in these and other contemporary works can provide new perspectives on these writers' re-evaluations of nationhood and community more broadly.