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，这些活动与更广泛的国家修辞不同步，而且由于更广泛的文化主导，很少受到学术关注。拟议的研究将检查与宗教在当代澳大拉西亚文学使用后世俗框架的约定。澳大拉西亚的名称（与大洋洲不同）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，从忠实到模棱两可，再到怀疑和持不同政见者。拟议的研究将提出这样一个问题：在当代澳大利亚文学中，是否出现了一种被忽视或被低估的后世俗观点？这个前景是如何呈现的？它的识别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？根据格雷厄姆·沃德（Graham Ward）的观察，“在文化上，我们仍然充斥着‘话语式的宗教虔诚’”，本研究将认为，多元的宗教活动继续充斥着当代澳大拉西亚文学，但很难用宗教与世俗之间的传统区别来描绘。在整个澳大拉西亚，在宗教的地位以及世俗与宗教的相互依存关系被忽视、破坏和贬低的地方，存在着学术遗漏。19世纪末到20世纪初，对清教主义“疾病”的强烈反对，在20世纪中后期转变为对宗教的温和厌恶。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·斯坦豪斯（John Stenhouse）所说的对宗教的“大声沉默”。这似乎构成了澳大利亚人“对宗教持怀疑态度”的更广泛模式的一部分，并结合了在文学批评中尤为突出的反教权主义。最近的学术研究发现，后世俗主义的概念显著发展，特别是在社会科学领域，在这些发展中，塔拉勒·阿萨德、约瑟夫·卡萨诺瓦、约翰·米尔班克和菲利普·布朗德的研究占主导地位。我采用“后世俗”框架，同时意识到围绕该术语的解释效力的争论（正如Graham Ward和Colin Jager所讨论的那样），同时认识到宗教和文学研究的后世俗“转向”促进了宗教和世俗相互作用的重要学术研究。虽然更传统的“神学和文学”研究为这项研究提供了信息，但它不会是神学阅读。相反，后世俗的框架将为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提供空间，这些复杂的区分和严格的二元对立。支撑我对后世俗的理解的主要轴心来自加文·霍普斯（Gavin Hopps），他认为文学的“后世俗观”可以是放弃“对现实的世俗解释，而不采取完全的宗教立场”，后世俗“建立在怀疑主义的基础上，如果不是更多的话。”霍普斯的理论与拟议的研究将导航的阈限文学主题一致。

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.