Post-Secular Imaginations in Contemporary Australia Literature

当代澳大拉西亚文学包含模棱两可和相互冲突的宗教活动，这些活动与更广泛的民族修辞不同步，并且由于更广泛的文化主导，很少受到学术关注。这项拟议的研究将使用后世俗框架来考察当代澳大拉西亚文学中与宗教的接触。澳大拉西亚(与大洋洲不同)指的是澳大利亚和新西兰，这两个国家的文本将产生横切的文学，照亮与宗教的文学接触，从忠诚的人，到模棱两可的人，再到怀疑和持不同政见者。这项拟议中的研究将提出一个问题：在当代澳大拉西亚文学中，是否出现了一种未被注意或被低估的后世俗观？这种前景是如何呈现的？它的认同和研究对澳大拉西亚的宗教和文学研究，以及更广泛的大洋洲后殖民文学研究意味着什么？与格雷厄姆·沃德的观点一致的是，“在文化上，我们仍然充斥着”漫无边际的宗教“，这项研究将认为，多元化的宗教活动继续渗透到当代澳大拉西亚文学中，但其方式很难用宗教和世俗之间的传统区别来描述。在整个澳大拉西亚，学术遗漏存在，在那里，宗教的地位以及世俗和宗教之间的相互依存被忽视、破坏和贬低。在十九世纪末到二十世纪初，对清教主义“疾病”的激烈异议，演变成了进入二十世纪中后期对更广泛的宗教的一种无声的厌恶。除了一些例外，在澳大拉西亚的学术研究中，普遍存在着约翰·斯滕豪斯所说的对宗教“响亮的沉默”。这似乎构成了更广泛的安第斯人对宗教的怀疑模式的一部分，与在文学批评中特别突出的反神职人员[主义]相结合。在最近的学术研究中，后世俗化的概念有了显著的发展，特别是在社会科学领域，塔拉尔·阿萨德、何塞·卡萨诺瓦、约翰·米尔班克和菲利普·金发在这些发展中占据主导地位。我采用“后世俗”的框架，意识到围绕该术语解释效力的争论(格雷厄姆·沃德和科林·贾格尔都曾讨论过)，同时也认识到宗教和文学研究中的后世俗“转向”促进了关于宗教和世俗互动的重要学术研究。虽然更传统的“神学和文学”研究为这项研究提供了信息，但它不会是一种神学解读。相反，后世俗框架将允许空间探索文学与宗教的冲突和异质接触，以及后殖民时代的错综复杂，具有严格的区别和僵化的二元论。支撑我对后世俗主义理解的主要轴心来自加文·霍普斯，他认为文学上的“后世俗观”可以是放弃“对现实的世俗解读，而不完全采取宗教立场”，而后世俗观则建立在“怀疑论”的基础上，而不是建立在信仰之上。霍普斯的理论与拟议的研究将涉及的有限的文学主题一致。

Contemporary Australasian literature contains equivocal and conflicted religious engagements which are out of sync with the wider national rhetoric and which, as a result of broader cultural dominances, have received little scholarly attention. The proposed research will examine engagements with religion in contemporary Australasian literature using a post-secular framework. The designation of Australasia (as distinct from Oceania) refers to Australia and New Zealand, and texts from both countries will generate a cross-section of literature, illuminating literary engagements with religion that span from the faithful, to the equivocal, to the sceptical and dissentient. The proposed research will ask the question: is there, within contemporary Australasian literature, the emergence of a post-secular outlook that has gone unnoticed or been under-appreciated? How is this outlook rendered? And what does its identification and study mean for Australasian religion and literatures studies, and Oceanic post-colonial literary studies more broadly? In line with Graham Ward's observation that 'culturally we are still awash with "discursive religiosity"', this research will contend that polytonal religious engagements continue to saturate contemporary Australasian literature, but in ways that are difficult to delineate in terms of the traditional distinction between the religious and the secular.Across Australasia, scholarly omissions exist where the place of religion, and the interdependency of the secular and the religious, is overlooked, undermined and devalued. Clamorous dissent over the 'disease' of Puritanism in the late-nineteenth to early twentieth-centuries modulated into a muted dis-ease toward religion more broadly going into the mid-to-late twentieth century. With some exceptions, there remains more generally what John Stenhouse has called a 'loud silence' on religion in Australasian academic studies. This appears to form part of a wider patter of Antipodean 'scepticism toward religion, combined with an anticlerical[ism]' that is especially prominent in literary criticism. Recent scholarship has seen the notion of post-secularity markedly evolve, particularly in the social sciences, with the work of Talal Asad, José Casanova, John Milbank and Philip Blond dominant in these developments. I take the 'post-secular' framework with an awareness of the contestation surrounding the term's explanatory efficacy (as has been discussed by both Graham Ward and Colin Jager ) whilst simultaneously recognising that a post-secular 'turn' in religion and literature studies has promoted vital scholarship on religious and secular inter-dynamics. While more traditional 'theology and literature' studies inform this research, it will not be a theological reading. Rather a post-secular framing will allow space to explore the literature's conflicted and heterogeneous engagements with religion, as well as post-colonial intricacies which bely harsh distinctions and rigid binaries. The major axis underpinning my understanding of post-secular comes from Gavin Hopps, who suggests that a literary 'post-secular outlook' can be the renouncement of 'a secular construal of reality without adopting an exclusively religious stance', with the post-secular founded 'on scepticism as much as if not more than it is on faith.' Hopps' theory aligns with the liminal literary subject matter which the proposed research will be navigating.