Blasphemous Modernism

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 DjunaBarnes 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 whichblasphemy is impossible"); their poems and fictions reveal how forcefully religion endured as a cultural force after the Death of God. More, their transgressions spotlight a politics of religion that has seldom engaged the attention of modernist studies. Blasphemy respects no division of church and state, and neither do the writers who wield it to profane all manner of coercive dogmas—including ecclesiastical as well as more worldly 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. Blasphemous Modernism thus resonates with the broader cultural andideological concerns that in recent years have enriched the scope of modernist scholarship.

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 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., 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., Steve Pinkerton's Blasphemous Modernism is an important study of modernist writers' continuing engagement with religion in the early twentieth century, At last! An intuitive and probing analysis of blasphemy and modernist writers, skillfully accomplished by exploring the real-world context of their works. This penetrating and lucid book pries apart the fundamental paradox of blasphemy within the modernist epoch

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