Daily Schedule of Readings 

for “Postsecular Studies and the Rise of the English Novel, 1719-1897” 

Draft as of January 13, 2016 - subject to change

Overview of Topics and Meetings: 

 

Week 1 – Postsecularity and the Novel 

 

Sunday 10 July: Dinner and meeting each other 

Monday 11 July: Introduction to the Seminar and Practicalities (am) 

Questioning the Place of Religion in the Rise of the Novel (pm) 

Wednesday 13 July: Postsecular studies from an interdisciplinary perspective 

Thursday 14 July: Afternoon presentations of four participant projects, 4-6 pm 

Friday 15 July: Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, with Colin Jager (Rutgers) 

 

Week 2 – Realism, Belief and Selfhood in the Eighteenth-Century 

 

Monday 18 July: Christian Smith’s work on personhood and narrative*  

Tuesday 19 July: Afternoon presentations of four participant projects, 4-6 pm 

Wednesday 20 July: Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (1719)* 

Thursday 21 July: Afternoon presentations of four participant projects, 4-6 pm 

Friday 22 July: Richard Graves, The Spiritual Quixote (1772), with Misty Anderson (Tennessee) on Methodism, the Novel, and the Mediation of British Identity 

 

Week 3 – Providence, Agency and Mediation in the Nineteenth Century 

 

Sunday 24 July: Evening Screening of Henry VIII (Globe Theatre, 2010) 

Monday 25 July: Providence, Agency and Mediation: Permeable Selves* 

Tuesday 26 July: Afternoon presentations of four participant projects, 4-6 pm

Wednesday 27 July: Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (1814), with Deidre Lynch (Harvard) 

Friday 29 July: Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit (1855-1857)* 

 

Week 4 – Revisiting the Sacramental in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century 

 

Monday 1 August: George MacDonald, Phantastes (1858)* 

Wednesday 3 August: The Sacramental, with Regina Schwartz (Northwestern) 

Friday 5 August: Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897) (am)* 

Concluding Session (pm) 

 

* = First half of seminar discussion led by 2-3 participants. 

 

Scholars will come to the seminar having read the six novels and with their own research project in hand, in one of 4 formats: a conference paper, a portion of an article or chapter, a book proposal, or a syllabus. During the seminar, participants will read the secondary material (also available in advance on a password-protected part of the website) and have multiple opportunities to workshop their project: with one of the directors, with one of the visiting scholars, and with the whole seminar at an afternoon meeting.     

 

Detailed Reading List 

 

Week 1 

 

Monday 11 July: Questioning the place of religion in the rise of the novel 

Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1957/2001), ch. 1, “Realism and the Novel Form” (9-34), ch. 10, “Realism and the Later Tradition” (290-301) 

Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1987), “Introduction: Dialectical Method in Literary History” (1-22), ch. 2, “The Evidence of the Senses: Secularization and Epistemological Crisis” (65-89) 

Michael McKeon, The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), from the Introduction (xvi-xxiii) 

Margaret Anne Doody, The True Story of the Novel (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1996), ch. 8, “The Ancient Novel, Religion, and Allegory” (160-72), ch. 12, “The Eighteenth Century – and Beyond: The Rise of Realism, and Escape from It” (274-300)  

Vivasvan Soni, Mourning Happiness: Narrative and the Politics of Modernity (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2010), Introduction, “What Happened to Happiness?” (1-24) 

Kevin Seidel, “Beyond the Religious and the Secular in the History of the Novel.” New Literary History 38.4 (2007): 637-47. 

Vincent P. Pecora, Secularization Without End: Beckett, Mann, Coetzee (Notre Dame, IN: U of Notre Dame P, 2015), Introduction: “Secularization and the History of the Novel” 

 

Wednesday 13 July: Postsecular studies from an interdisciplinary perspective 

Danièle Hervieu-Léger, Religion as a Chain of Memory, trans. Simon Lee (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2000), ch. 1, “Sociology in Opposition to Religion? Preliminary Considerations” (9-22), ch. 2, “The Fragmentation of Religion in Modern Societies” (23-41) 

Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), “Introduction: Thinking about Secularism” (1-17)” and ch. 1, “What Might an Anthropology of Secularism Look Like?” (21-66) 

Jürgen Habermas, “Notes on a Post-Secular Society,” in New Perspectives Quarterly 25.4 (2008): 17-29. 

Jacques Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone”, in Acts of Religion, ed. and intro. Gil Anidjar (London and NY: Routledge, 2002), 42-60. 

Michael Kaufmann, “Rethinking the Secularization Narrative in Histories of the Profession.” New Literary History 38.4 (2007): 607-27. 

Lori Branch, “Postsecular Studies,” in The Routledge Companion to Literature and Religion (forthcoming 2016) 

 

Friday 15 July: Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, with Colin Jager (Rutgers) 

Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2007), Introduction (1-22), ch. 1, “The Bulwarks of Belief” (25-89), ch. 7, “The Impersonal Order” (270-95), and ch. 15, “The Immanent Frame” (539-93)  

Michael Warner, Jonathan VanAntwerpen and Craig Calhoun, eds., Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010): Editors’ “Introduction” (1-31); John Milbank, “A Closer Walk on the Wild Side” (54-82); Colin Jager, “This Detail, This History: Charles Taylor’s Romanticism” (166-92) and Taylor’s “Afterword” (300-321) 

Stanley Hauerwas and Romand Coles, “Long Live the Weeds and the Wilderness Yet: Reflections on A Secular Age”, Modern Theology 26.3 (2010): 349-62.  

 

Week 2 

 

Monday 18 July: Christian Smith’s work on personhood and narrative 

Christian Smith, Moral, Believing Animals: Human Personhood and Culture (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003), Introduction (3-5); ch. 3, “Believing Animals” (45-61); ch. 4, “Living Narratives” (63-94)  

Christian Smith, What is a Person? Rethinking Humanity, Social Life, and the Moral Good from the Person Up (Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 2010), Introduction (1-22) and ch. 1, “The Emergence of Personhood” (25-89) 

Danièle Hervieu-Léger, Religion as a Chain of Memory, ch. 4, “Religion as a Way of Believing” (65-82) 

John Zizioulas, Communion & Otherness: Further Studies in Personhood and the Church (London: T & T Clark, 2007), Introduction, “Communion and Otherness” (1-12), ch. 2, “On Being a Person: Towards an Ontology of Personhood” (99-112) 

Gerard Loughlin, Telling God’s Story: Bible, Church and Narrative Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996), ch. 3, “Character/circumstance/community” (64-103) 

 

Wednesday 20 July: Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (1719) 

Ian Watt, “Robinson Crusoe, Individualism and the Novel,” in The Rise of the Novel (60-92) 

John Richetti, “Secular Crusoe: The Reluctant Pilgrim Re-Visited,” in Eighteenth-Century Genre and Culture: Serious Reflections on Occasional Forms: Essays in Honor of J. Paul Hunter, eds. Dennis Todd and Cynthia Wall (Newark, NJ: U of Delaware P, 2001), 58-78.  

Graham Ward, True Religion (Blackwell, 2002), ch. 2, “True Religion and Temporal Goods” (35-72) 

Andrew J. Williams, “‘Differ with Charity:’ Religious Tolerance and Secularization in The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe,” forthcoming in Religion & Literature 47.3 (Spring/Summer 2016) 

 

Friday 22 July: Richard Graves, The Spiritual Quixote (1772), with Misty Anderson (Tennessee) on Methodism and the Mediation of British Identity 

Misty G. Anderson, Imagining Methodism in Eighteenth-Century Britain: Enthusiasm, Belief and the Borders of the Self (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), Introduction, “Longing to Believe: Methodism and Modernity” (1-33); ch. 6, “A Usable Past: Reconciliation in Humphrey Clinker and The Spiritual Quixote” (200-31); Afterword – “1778 and Beyond” (232-38) 

Vivasvan Soni, Mourning Happiness: Narrative and the Politics of Modernity (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2010), ch. 7, “Marriage Plot” (267-89)  

 

Week 3 

 

Monday 25 July: Providence, Agency, and Mediation: Permeable Selves 

Frederick Jameson, “The Experiments of Time: Providence and Realism”, in Franco Moretti, The Novel, Volume 2 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2006), 95-127 

Colin Gunton, The Christian Faith: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), ch. 1 “Establishing the Doctrine of Creation” (3-19) and ch. 2 “Providence” (20-37) 

Peter Van Inwagen, God, Knowledge, and Mystery (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), ch. 2 “The Place of Chance in a World Sustained by God” 

Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2005), “The First Day” (1-18), “The Fourth Day” (59-87) 

Mark Knight, ch. 3, “Mediating the Divine: Law, Gift, and Justice” [on Kafka and Dickens], in An Introduction to Religion and Literature (London: Continuum, 2009), 47-67. 

 

Wednesday 27 July: Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (1814), with Deidre Lynch (Harvard) 

Colin Jager, “Mansfield Park and the End of Natural Theology,” MLQ 63.1 (2002): 31-63 

Nina Auerbach, “Jane Austen's Dangerous Charm: Feeling as One Ought about Fanny Price,” in Mansfield Park and Persuasion: New Casebooks, ed. Judy Simon, (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1997) 

Peter Knox-Shaw, Jane Austen and the Enlightenment, ch. 6, “Mansfield Park: Charting the Religious Revival” 

Shakespeare, Henry VIII 

 

Friday 29 July: Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit (1855-57) 

George Levine, Realism, Ethics and Secularism (Cambridge UP, 2008), ch. 8 “Dickens, Secularism and Agency” (210-244) 

Janet Larson, Dickens and the Broken Scripture (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1985), ch. 5, “The Seer, the Preacher, and the Living Gospel: Vision and Revision in Little Dorrit” (179-278) 

John Schad, Queer Fish: Christian Unreason from Darwin to Derrida (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2004), Introduction, “Dover Beached” (1-8) and ch. 4 “Subterranean Soul: Dickens’ Cryptic Church” (77-93) 

 

Week 4 

 

Monday 1 August: George MacDonald, Phantastes (1858) 

George MacDonald, “The Imagination: Its Function and Its Culture” British Quarterly Review 46 (1867): 45-70.  

J. R. R. Tolkien, “On Faery-Stories,” from Tree and Leaf 

Sharon Kim, “Epiphany and Enquiry” and “Reading Epiphany” in Literary Epiphany in the Novel, 1850-1950: Constellations of the Soul (Palgrave Macmillan 2012), 1-29, 151-58 

Trevor Hart, ch. 1 “Between the Image and the Word” (13-42) and ch. 2 “The Promise and the Sign” (43-74) in Between the Image and the Word (Ashgate: 2013) 

 

Wednesday 3 August: The Sacramental, with Regina Schwartz (Northwestern) 

Regina Schwartz, Sacramental Poetics at the Dawn of Secularism (Stanford University Press, 2008): “Preface” (xi-xiii); ch. 1, “Sacramental Poetics” (3-17); ch. 2, “Mystical and Political Bodies” (18-35); ch. 6, “Herbert’s Praise: Communion in Conversation” (117-37); “Afterword” (139-41) 

 

Friday 5 August: Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897) 

Patrick O’Malley, ch. 4 “The Blood of the Saints” (130-64) in Catholicism, Sexual Deviance and Victorian Gothic Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) 

Christopher Herbert, “Vampire Religion”, Representations 79.1 (2002): 100-121. 

Elizabeth M. Sanders, “An Up-To-Date Religion: The Challenges and Constructions of Belief in Dracula,” forthcoming in Religion & Literature 47.3 (2015) 

Lori Branch, “Sacramental Prosaics: Bram Stoker’s Dracula and the Remains of Religion in Modernity,” forthcoming in a volume on Sacramental Poetics, eds. Regina Schwartz and Patrick J. McGrath