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Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific DiscourseCoda: Speculations

Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse: Coda: Speculations [Why religio-scientific discourse at the turn of the twentieth century? How does it address a newly malleable body? Why the modernist skepticism about the materiality of our world? Why the attraction to this mode of discourse for writers of the period? Louis Martz suggests that it is a disaster like war that evokes such reactions: “[P]rophetic writing is born out of disaster or the threat of disasters, out of the human need to believe in more than destruction. And in our century the genre of prophetic writing has again come alive. It was first created out of the ashes of World War I” (Many 5). Helen Sword echoes this sentiment about catastrophe and modernism when she links the epochs “spiritual disenchantment” to occult and spiritualist writing: “[I]t was, no doubt, modernism’s very emphasis on irony and spiritual disenchantment that triggered, in turn, a compensatory longing for otherworldly insight and spiritual fulfillment” (Engendering 2). There seems little doubt that the myriad historical and cultural forces typically cast as contexts for the emergence of avant-garde and modernist art and literature—industrial and technological revolutions, progressive social reform movements, world wars and decolonization, labor unrest, racial strife, mass waves of immigration into America from Europe and Asia, the rise of psychoanalysis, and so forth—can be tied as well to the convergence of religious and scientific discourse and to shifting notions of embodiment.] http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png

Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific DiscourseCoda: Speculations

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Publisher
Palgrave Macmillan US
Copyright
© Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Nature America Inc. 2010
ISBN
978-1-349-38325-2
Pages
159 –161
DOI
10.1057/9780230106451_5
Publisher site
See Chapter on Publisher Site

Abstract

[Why religio-scientific discourse at the turn of the twentieth century? How does it address a newly malleable body? Why the modernist skepticism about the materiality of our world? Why the attraction to this mode of discourse for writers of the period? Louis Martz suggests that it is a disaster like war that evokes such reactions: “[P]rophetic writing is born out of disaster or the threat of disasters, out of the human need to believe in more than destruction. And in our century the genre of prophetic writing has again come alive. It was first created out of the ashes of World War I” (Many 5). Helen Sword echoes this sentiment about catastrophe and modernism when she links the epochs “spiritual disenchantment” to occult and spiritualist writing: “[I]t was, no doubt, modernism’s very emphasis on irony and spiritual disenchantment that triggered, in turn, a compensatory longing for otherworldly insight and spiritual fulfillment” (Engendering 2). There seems little doubt that the myriad historical and cultural forces typically cast as contexts for the emergence of avant-garde and modernist art and literature—industrial and technological revolutions, progressive social reform movements, world wars and decolonization, labor unrest, racial strife, mass waves of immigration into America from Europe and Asia, the rise of psychoanalysis, and so forth—can be tied as well to the convergence of religious and scientific discourse and to shifting notions of embodiment.]

Published: Nov 24, 2015

Keywords: Cultural Force; Bodily Agency; Labor Unrest; Mass Wave; Modernist Writing

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