Introduction: Argument and Contexts

Abstract

This book explores James Joyce’s and W. B. Yeats’s poetics and political aesthetics through using variously defined concepts of epiphany, transubstantiation, and epiclesis in a theoretical framework derived from the theory of social myth developed by Georges Sorel (1847–1922). I aim to sketch a theory of art in which the experience of art, like that of social myth, can be seen as a form of religious experience. The theorisation of the experience of art as a form of religious experience will lead to an interpretation of the role of art in engendering social attitudes in opposition to economic materialism and liberal capitalism. I will explore the ways in which a theory that defines the experience of art as a form of religious experience can help us answer three questions of pressing interest for the contemporary moment: How can we read cultural texts to imagine forms of social belonging through which to challenge the isolation of economic materialism? How can we imagine cultural texts to create the collective relations necessary for social change in global capitalism? How can we define an ethics of satisfaction that does not relate to this capital modernity?