Blasphemous Modernism

The 20th-Century Word Made Flesh

Steve Pinkerton

Modernist Literature and Culture

Theorizes how blasphemy works as a form of literary expression.
Studies a diverse range of modernist poets and novelists, including women writers, queer writers, and writers of color.
Brings a "new modernist studies" orientation to bear on the topic of religion in modernism.
Shows how blasphemy serves writers as a way to forge (and also to satirize) such signally modernist subjectivities as "the New Woman" and "the New Negro."
Argues that God is not "dead" for modernist writers and instead persists-somewhat perversely-by serving as a vital and potent object of profanation.
Engages the ongoing "religious turn" in the humanities and social sciences.

Blasphemous Modernism

The 20th-Century Word Made Flesh

Steve Pinkerton

Modernist Literature and Culture

Description

Scholars have long described modernism as "heretical" or "iconoclastic" in its assaults on secular traditions of form, genre, and decorum. Yet critics have paid surprisingly little attention to the related category of blasphemy—the rhetoric of religious offense—and to the specific ways this rhetoric operates in, and as, literary modernism. United by a shared commitment to "the word made flesh," writers such as James Joyce, Mina Loy, Richard Bruce Nugent, and Djuna Barnes made blasphemy a key component of their modernist practice, profaning the very scriptures and sacraments that fueled their art. In doing so they belied T. S. Eliot's verdict that the forces of secularization had rendered blasphemy obsolete in an increasingly godless century ("a world in which blasphemy is impossible"); their poems and fictions reveal how forcefully religion endured as a cultural force after the Death of God. Blasphemy respects no division of church and state, and neither do the writers who wield it to profane coercive dogmas—including ecclesiastical and terrestrial ideologies of race, class, nation, empire, gender, and sexuality. The late-century example of Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses affords, finally, a demonstration of how modernism persists in postwar Anglophone literature and of the critical role blasphemy plays in that persistence. The transgressions of these writers spotlight a politics of religion that has seldom engaged the attention of modernist studies. Blasphemous Modernism enriches the scope of modernist scholarship by resonating with broader cultural and ideological concerns.

Blasphemous Modernism

The 20th-Century Word Made Flesh

Steve Pinkerton

Modernist Literature and Culture

Contents
Introduction: “First-Rate Blasphemy”
1. “For This is My Body”: James Joyce's Unholy Office
2. Blasphemy and the New Woman: Mina Loy's Profane Communions
3. Blasphemy and the New Negro: Black Christs, “Livid Tongues”
4. Go Down, Djuna: The Art of “Transcendence Downward”
Conclusion: To Be as Gods
Bibliography

Blasphemous Modernism

The 20th-Century Word Made Flesh

Steve Pinkerton

Modernist Literature and Culture

Author Information

Steve Pinkerton, Lecturer in English, Case Western Reserve University

Steve Pinkerton is a Lecturer in English at Case Western Reserve University.

Blasphemous Modernism

The 20th-Century Word Made Flesh

Steve Pinkerton

Modernist Literature and Culture

Reviews and Awards

"In its explorations of religion and blasphemy, Steve Pinkerton's Blasphemous Modernism: The 20th-Century Word Made Flesh interrogates and challenges common understandings of the period as uninterested in religion's primacy: it 'attends to the complex relationship in modernist texts between words, the Word, and the flesh'. Most compellingly, Pinkerton points to the ways that 'blasphemy is a barometer and a mechanism of power, a discourse governed by the powerful but also occasionally usurped by the marginalized in politically significant ways'" - The Year's Work in English Studies

"The author has done something undeniably important in explicating the blasphemous play of several important modernist artists. He has also opened the door for consideration of the nature and function of blasphemy in the work of authors who do sometimes validate the truth claims of religion - figures such as Flannery O'Connor, Graham Greene, Shusaku Endo, and Marilynne Robinson. One of the greatest accomplishments of Blasphemous Modernism is that it forces us to return to the scene of some of modernism's greatest crimes against God and ask, not for the first time, if any crime were actually committed." - Martin Lockerd, Modernism/Modernity

"Pinkerton's study is textually focused and compiles a lively and readable collection of examples of blasphemy. ... an important contribution to rethinking the engagement of modernist writers with religion, and makes a persuasive case for the importance of blasphemy as a category of study in its own right." - Imogen Woodberry, Los Angeles Review of Books