Fault Lines of Modernity

Kitty Millet is Professor of Comparative Jewish Literatures and Holocaust Studies, as well as Chair of the Department of Jewish Studies, at San Francisco State University, USA. She is also chairperson of the International Comparative Literature Association (ICLA) research committee on Religion, Ethics, and Literature. Her book, The Victims of Slavery, Colonization, and the Holocaust: A Comparative History of Persecution (Bloomsbury, 2017), analyzes the constitutive side of victimization within three groups, slaves in the Americas, Africans under German colonization, and death camp survivors of the Reinhard camps.Dorothy Figueira is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Georgia, USA. She is the author of three books, including Otherwise Occupied: Theories and Pedagogies of Alterity (2008), and the editor of three books. She is past President of the International Comparative Literature Association (2005-6), former Editor of The Comparatist (2007-2011), and current Editor of the journal, Recherche littéraire/ Literary Research.

The project undertaken in Fault Lines of Modernity: The Fractures and Repairs of Religion, Ethics, and Literature is, by nature of its subject, large, complex, and at times contradictory. It is also fascinating, compelling, and thought provoking.

• AcknowledgmentsIntroductionKitty Millet (San Francisco State University, USA)I. The Transcendental and Transcendence1. Rewriting Grand Narratives as a Supratemporal Mystical Competition: Illustrations from Dante, Rabelais, Cervantes, Goethe, Proust, Mann, and Joyce Gerald Gillespie (Stanford University, USA)2. "Clearer Awareness of the … Crisis": Erich Auerbach’s Radical Relativism and the "Rich Tensions" of the Historical Imperative Geoffrey Green (San Francisco State University, USA)3. Secularism and Post-Secularism Wlad Godzich (University of California at Santa Cruz, USA)II. Literature4. Redemptive Readings between Maurice Blanchot and Franz RosenzweigShawna Vesco (University of California at Santa Cruz, USA)5. “So What If You Are Big?”: Divisive Identities and the Ethics of Pluralism in Medieval Indian Literatures of Devotion Ipshita Chanda (Jadavpur University, India, and Georgetown University, USA)6. Alterity and the Ethics of the Novel in J. M. Coetzee's Quasi-RealismChristopher Weinberger (San Francisco State University, USA)III. Religion7. Asmodeus, the “Eye of Providence,” and the Ethics of Seeing in 19th-Century Mystery Fiction Sara Hackenberg (San Francisco State University, USA)8. Modernism’s Religious Rhetorics: Or, What Bothered Baudelaire Hope Hodgkins (University of North Carolina, Greensboro, USA)9. Poetry and Religion: Approaches to Christian Transcendence in Late 20th-Century Poets Stephanie Heimgartner (Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany)IV. Ethics10. Instituting the Other: Ethical Fault Lines in Readings and Pedagogies of AlterityDorothy Figueira (University of Georgia, USA)11. Thinking God on the Basis of Ethics: Levinas, The Brothers Karamazov, and Dostoevsky’s Anti-Semitism Steven Shankman (University of Oregon, USA)12. An Ethics for Missing PersonsKitty Millet (San Francisco State University, USA)Index