Finding the Right Kind of Attention: Dystopia and Transcendence in John Burnside’s Glister

Abstract

In recent times, scholars have spoken of a ‘religious turn’ taking place in the humanities, including literary and cultural studies. They have done so in view of what is frequently seen as a very powerful contemporary resurgence of religion that seems to negate the validity of the secularisation thesis, in view of an increasing questioning and deconstruction of the established opposition between the secular and the religious itself, as well as of a general growing interest among critics and theorists in the topic of religion and spirituality. In 1995, John McClure, in his seminal discussion of American Postmodernism, argued that much of the writing from the 1960s onwards had to be read not as thoroughly secularised but, on the contrary, in terms of ‘a post-secular project of resacralization’ (McClure, 1995, p. 144). I want to read John Burnside’s recent novel Glister as part of this project, as a work that, in the words of McClure, ‘maintains and revises a modernist tradition of spiritually inflected resistance to conventionally secular constructions of reality’ (McClure, 1995, p. 143).