Partial Faiths

[Dave Monroe]

McClure, John A.  "Postmodern/Post-Secular: Contemporary Fiction
   and Spirituality."  Modern Fiction Studies 41.1 (1995): 141-163.

Thomas Pynchon's novels, frequently cited by students of postmodernism
as exemplary texts, are a veritable index to the new spiritualities.
Awash in paranormal events, they represent the world in ways that
reflect the disparate ontologies of gnosticism, spiritualism, Native
American and African religious traditions, the martial arts traditions
of the East, and American transcendentalism....

[...]

How, then, do the texts of what might be called high
postmodernism-texts such as Gravity's Rainbow or Vineland-engineer
this strange combination of cosmic irreverence and comic advocacy? How
do they manage at once to mock advocacy and practice it? ...

http://english.rutgers.edu/faculty/profiles/mcclure1997.html
http://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/modern_fiction_studies/v041/41.1mcclure.html

McClure, John A.   Partial Faiths: Postsecular Fiction
   in the Age of Pynchon and Morrison.  Athens: U of Ga P, 2007.

What contemporary novels tell us about our yearning for a spirituality
of substance without dogma

Spiritual conversions figure heavily in such novels as Thomas
Pynchon's Vineland, Toni Morrison's Paradise, and Louise Erdrich's
Love Medicine. What connects such varied works is that their
convert-characters are disenchanted with secularism yet apprehensive
of dogmatic religiosity. Partial Faiths is the first study to identify
a body of contemporary fiction in such terms, take the measure of its
structures and strategies, and evaluate its contribution to public
discourse on religion's place in postmodern life.

Postsecularism is most often associated with philosophers and
theorists such as Jacques Derrida, Richard Rorty, Charles Taylor,
William Connolly, Jürgen Habermas, and Gianni Vattimo. But it is also
being explored and invented, says John A. McClure, by many novelists:
Leslie Marmon Silko, Don DeLillo, Michael Ondaatje, and N. Scott
Momaday among others. These novelists, who are often regarded as
belonging to different domains of contemporary fiction, are fleshing
out the postsecular issues that scholars treat more abstractly.

But the modes of belief elaborated in these novels and the new
narrative forms synchronized with these modes are dramatically partial
and open-ended. Postsecular fiction does not aspire to any full
"mapping" of the reenchanted cosmos or any formal moral code, nor does
it promise anything like full redemption. It is partial in another
sense as well: it is emphatically dedicated to progressive ideals of
social transformation and well-being, in repudiation of resurgent
fundamentalist prescriptions for the same.

http://www.ugapress.uga.edu/0820330329.html

John A. McClure
Professor of English

http://english.rutgers.edu/faculty/profiles/mcclure.html

Monday, March 17, 2008
John A. McClure's Partial Faiths: Postsecular Fiction in the Age of
Pynchon and Morrison

http://politicsandreligion-danny.blogspot.com/2008/03/john-mcclures-partial-faiths.html