Ambivalent secularization: the modern novel and confession

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Title Ambivalent secularization: the modern novel and confession
Publication Type dissertation
School or College College of Humanities
Department English
Author Siemers, Ryan R.
Date 2018
Description Contrary to Ian Watt, Michael McKeon, Franco Moretti, and others who see the novel as marginalizing religion through Weberian rationalization, I argue in my dissertation that a religious legacy from the Catholic sacrament of penance (ritual confession) motivates the first-person narrators of the novels that I examine. In what I call the legacy of cathartic self-narration, the narrator expects that guilt or anger associated with certain memories may be alleviated through the narration of those memories to a listener or reader. Lucy Snowe, the Protestant narrator of Charlotte Brontë's Villette (1853), redefines the cathartic urge in biological terms and confesses her complaints without guilt. By contrast, the guilt-ridden secular narrators of modern fictional autobiographies-in particular, John Dowell in Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier (1915), Humbert Humbert in Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita (1955), and Thomas Crick in Graham Swift's Waterland (1983)-do expect to relieve their guilt through their narrative confessions. They experience frustration, however, because the reader cannot absolve them-nor can they absolve themselves. In response to this dilemma, they invent metaphysical frameworks that generalize their conditions, establishing a relationship between self and world that affords them minimal consolation. They exemplify ambivalent secularization by demonstrating how a religious remnant within secularity can motivate the return of religion in a distorted form.
Type Text
Publisher University of Utah
Subject Lolita; The good soldier; Villette; waterland
Dissertation Name Doctor of Philosophy
Language eng
Rights Management (c) Ryan R. Siemers
Format application/pdf
Format Medium application/pdf
ARK ark:/87278/s6c99rk3
Setname ir_etd
ID 1748482
Reference URL https://collections.lib.utah.edu/ark:/87278/s6c99rk3
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