The Function of Criticism in a “Post-secular” Age

Abstract

In “The Function of Criticism in a ‘Post-Secular’ Age,” Vincent Pecora addresses the issue of the critical vocabulary and new mental frame needed to reopen the question of how we talk (or remain silent) about the religious elements of literary texts (belief, doctrine, the distinction between religion and myth) from the Enlightenment on, with a focus on the tools (or lack thereof) at our disposal. Challenging the supposed religious-to-secular narrative of epistemological progress, Pecora problematizes the various modes of the “post-secular,” and the powerful traditions of thought behind them, suggesting other ways of understanding religious currents in literary texts. Precisely because religion as an imaginative human production continues to be as central in the long view as literature, it should not be ignored. Pecora concludes that post-secular literary interpretation can only be embraced once we acknowledge that secularization and religious revival are not mutually exclusive historical categories, and that understanding religion in the text is more properly a question of language, of tracing out the discursive patterns of doctrines and their secularization that have come to thread themselves throughout our literary traditions.