Conversion and Literature

Catalog description

Taught by GTU. The course will explore the phenomenon of religious conversion in its intersection with literature, with selected readings from such primary sources as the autobiographies of Augustine and Hermann-Judah as well as historical and theoretical studies of this intersection. The course will also include a strong focus on American literature and religious imagination. In this regard, the course takes up the phenomenon of conversion--made central to the study of religion by William James in his Varieties of Religious Experience (1903) as a place for re-mapping the dynamics between religion and American literature, that is, the movement of theology into the aesthetic and vice-versa. How might we read the literary, the poetic, as the converted forms of religious experience and theology? What gets changed, what is left behind, what is added by such transpositions? Readings in this part of the course include both autobiographical and fictionalized representations of conversion (Malcolm X, Louise Erdrich), and formative Puritan conversionary experiences in the "new" world that shaped the canonical foundations of American literature (Jonathan Edwards). Additional fiction by Toni Morrison, Henry James, Flannery O'Connor, and Marilynne Robinson will be covered; poetry and poetics include work by some of the Beats (Kerouac, Snyder), Susan Howe, Whitman, and Wallace Stevens. Course Audience: PhD, MA. Oral Presentation; Final Research Essay. [Auditors with faculty permission]