Post-Secular Imaginations in Contemporary Australia Literature

当代澳大拉西亚文学包含模棱两可和冲突的宗教活动，与更广泛的国家言论不同步，由于更广泛的文化优势，很少受到学术关注。拟议的研究将使用后世俗的框架检查与宗教在当代澳大拉西亚文学的参与。澳大拉西亚（有别于大洋洲）指的是澳大利亚和新西兰，来自这两个国家的文本将产生一个文学的横截面，照亮文学与宗教的接触，从信徒，到模棱两可，到怀疑和异议。拟议中的研究将提出这样一个问题：在当代澳大拉西亚文学中，是否出现了一种未被注意或未得到充分重视的后世俗观？这一前景是如何呈现的？它的发现和研究对澳大拉西亚宗教和文学研究，乃至更广泛的大洋洲后殖民文学研究有何意义？根据格雷厄姆·沃德的观察，“在文化上，我们仍然充斥着”话语宗教“，这项研究将争辩说，多色调的宗教活动继续充斥当代澳大拉西亚文学，但在宗教和世俗之间的传统区别方面，很难描绘。在整个澳大拉西亚，学术遗漏存在的地方，宗教，以及世俗和宗教的相互依存，被忽视，破坏和贬低。从19世纪末到20世纪初，对清教主义“疾病”的强烈异议，在进入20世纪中后期时，逐渐演变成了对宗教更为广泛的一种无声的疾病。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·斯坦豪斯所说的对宗教的“大声沉默”。这似乎构成了安提波迪亚人“对宗教的怀疑主义，与反教权主义相结合”的更广泛模式的一部分，这种模式在文学批评中尤为突出。最近的学术界已经看到后世俗的概念显着发展，特别是在社会科学领域，Talal Asad，José Casanova，John Milbank和Philip Blond的工作在这些发展中占主导地位。我采取的“后世俗”的框架与周围的术语的解释效力（已经讨论了格雷厄姆沃德和科林贾格尔），同时认识到，后世俗的“转”在宗教和文学研究促进了重要的奖学金宗教和世俗的相互作用的认识。 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阅读。相反，后世俗的框架将允许空间来探索文学与宗教的冲突和异质性的参与，以及后殖民的复杂性，这些复杂性带来了严厉的区分和严格的二元性。支撑我对后世俗的理解的主轴来自加文·霍普斯（Gavin Hopps），他提出，文学的“后世俗观”可以是“对现实的世俗性的放弃，而不采取纯粹的宗教立场”，后世俗的基础“与怀疑论一样多，如果不是更多的话，它是基于信仰。“霍普斯”理论与拟议的研究将导航的阈文学主题一致。

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.