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Spiritual conversions figure heavily in such novels as Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland, Toni Morrison’s Paradise, and Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine. What connects such varied works is that their convert-characters are disenchanted with secularism yet apprehensive of dogmatic religiosity. Partial Faiths is the first study to identify a body of contemporary fiction in such terms, take the measure of its structures and strategies, and evaluate its contribution to public discourse on religion’s place in postmodern life.Postsecularism is most often associated with philosophers and theorists such as Jacques Derrida, Richard Rorty, Charles Taylor, William Connolly, Jürgen Habermas, and Gianni Vattimo. But it is also being explored and invented, says John A. McClure, by many novelists: Leslie Marmon Silko, Don DeLillo, Michael Ondaatje, and N. Scott Momaday among others. These novelists, who are often regarded as belonging to different domains of contemporary fiction, are fleshing out the postsecular issues that scholars treat more abstractly.But the modes of belief elaborated in these novels and the new narrative forms synchronized with these modes are dramatically partial and open-ended. Postsecular fiction does not aspire to any full “mapping” of the reenchanted cosmos or any formal moral code, nor does it promise anything like full redemption. It is partial in another sense as well: it is emphatically dedicated to progressive ideals of social transformation and well-being, in repudiation of resurgent fundamentalist prescriptions for the same.
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Surpassed as the world's most vigorous capitalist manufacturer by Japan and Germany, the US now seems bound for the same rocky shores as those on which Britannia foundered at the end of the nineteenth century.John McClure charts the course of decline, first in the works of Joseph Conrad, chronicler of high imperialism's contradictions, then in the post-war fictions of Joan Didion, Robert Stone and Thomas Pynchon. He maps the complex field of romantic ideology where one can at once excoriate imperialist adventures and yet savor their taste. Late Imperial Romance thus pinpoints the contradictions and aporias of anti-imperial rhetoric among the high intelligentsia of the post-war US. Through close, sensitive, historically informed readings of their work, McClure shows how these writers create an emotive space in which the critique of imperialism is shadowed by a continuing entanglement with its ideology: running through these works is a basic imperialist theme which portrays the non-metropolitan world as enchanted environs where the white hero or heroine is tested-and not infrequently corrupted.Building on work by Frederic Jameson, McClure presents a highly original and provocative account of the ideological function of romantic fictions in the late capitalist US. A model of intelligent cultural analysis, Late Imperial Romance combines skillful literary interpretation with an acute sense of the socio-historical conditions of literary production.