Elite culture’s proclamation of the death of God (in the West, anyway) has kept us from recognizing that modernists continued “to seek in scripture and theology the particular sources of meaning, affect, and ix Pinkerton’s Blasphemous Modernism: The 20th-Century Word Made Flesh acknowledges the rich history of literary blasphemy but in the modernist period, he argues, blasphemy becomes fundamental in a new way. Although in the Nativity Ode Milton steers well clear of the blasphemous- nothing wrong with an admiring glance at pre-Christian majesty-in Paradise Lost Milton would have to work harder to fend off charges that he might be usurping rather than elaborating scriptural authority. And yet the awe and solemnity evoked in Milton’s description of the lost world bespeaks what today we have learned to call ambivalence, and an ambivalent relation to religious orthodoxy, Steve Pinkerton shows, lies at the heart of blasphemy. With the dawn of Christianity, the classical world, safely stripped of its false divinity, becomes available as trope.
Blasphemous modernism series#
Series Editors’ Foreword In a celebrated sequence of Milton’s “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity” (1629), the poet revisits a favorite theme of Christian humanism-t he triumph of baby Jesus over the pagan gods-in the silencing of classical oracles: “Apollo from his shrine /Can no more divine.” But banished gods have a way of returning, and so when “Our Babe” in the cradle is revealed as having the power to “control the damned crew” of deposed deities, forcing them to abide in a past sealed off forever from the new truth that has entered the world, His strength is made manifest through classical allusion: “The dreaded Infant’s hand,” that is, the hand of Hercules, who strangled serpents (evoked by Milton’s “snaky twine”) in his crib. Go Down, Djuna: The Art of “Transcendence Downward” 110Ĭonclusion: To Be as Gods 131 Notes 143 Works Cited 163 Index 179 Blasphemy and the New Negro: Black Christs, “Livid Tongues” 79Ĥ. Blasphemy and the New Woman: Mina Loy’s Profane Communions 51ģ. “For This Is My Body”: James Joyce’s Unholy Office 19Ģ. Mina Loy, “Aphorisms on Futurism” (1914)Ĭontents Series Editors’ Foreword ix Acknowledgments xiii Introduction: “First-Rate Blasphemy” 1ġ. thus shall evolve the language of the Future. S. Eliot, After Strange Gods (1934) to your blushing we shout the obscenities, we scream the blasphemies, that you, being weak, whisper alone in the dark… . I think that there is an interesting subject of investigation, for the student of traditions, in the history of Blasphemy, and the anomalous position of that term in the modern world.
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