This module explores some of the ways in which literature has explored and expressed the complexity of belief and doubt, redemption and apocalypse, damnation and revelation, in the modern world.
We will consider the ways in which moments, motifs and ideas indebted to the sacred can be found within the traces, margins, narratives and echoes found in the literature of the modern world.
Although welcoming consideration of all three Abrahamic faiths, we will focus primarily on Christian traditions and their life, afterlives and influences in literature.
Authors studied may include such as Toni Morrison, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Oscar Wilde, Douglas Coupland, Kamilla Shamsie, James Baldwin, Marilynne Robinson, Christina Rossetti, Samuel Beckett, Flannery O'Connor, Charles Dickens, Cormac McCarthy, G. K. Chesterton and the Brontës.
The exploration of literature will be complemented by philosophical writings on religion by writers such as J. Kameron Carter, Zhange Ni, Walter Benjamin, Ziad Elmsafy, Sarah Coakley, Michael D. Hurley and Friedrich Nietzsche.