Secularization and Cultural Criticism - by Vincent P Pecora (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Religion is an undiscovered country for much of the secular academy, which remains deeply ambivalent about it as an object of study. On the one hand, secular scholars agree that it is time to take religion seriously. On the other, these same scholars persist in assuming that religion rests not on belief but on power and ideology. According to Vincent Pecora, the idea of the secular itself is the source of much of the contradiction and confusion in contemporary thought about religion. Pecora aims here to work through the paradoxes of secularization, which emerges in this book as an intractable problem for cultural criticism in the nation-states of the post-Enlightenment West.

Secularization and Cultural Criticism examines the responses of a wide range of thinkers--Edward Said, Talal Asad, Jürgen Habermas, Walter Benjamin, Emile Durkheim, Carl Schmitt, Matthew Arnold, and Virginia Woolf, among others--to illustrate exactly why the problem of secularization in the study of society and culture should matter once again. Exploring the endemic difficulty posed by religion for the modern academy, Pecora makes sense of the value and potential impasses of secular cultural criticism in a global age.

Review Quotes

"The key to Pecora's argument here is not that Durkheim . . . was mistaken or confused, but rather that this very tension is a symptom of the 'necessarily distorting consequences of Western secularization.' Pecora's triumph in this book is to give us a rich account of those distortions and their ramifications for cultural theory."--Colin Jager "MLR"

"At a moment of frightening emergency for Edward Said's secular ideal, Vincent Pecora offers an ingenious and innovative defense: he concedes the ideal's ambiguities, fills in its compromising history of continuing engagement with religious tradition, and sets up a subtle and judicious negotiation with its detractors in which they too are asked to concede their deep complicity with the secularism they oppose. This work of high and generous intelligence shows us interdisciplinarity in the most visibly valuable sense."

--Bruce Robbins, author of Feeling Global: Internationalism in Distress

"Vincent Pecora's important new book offers a powerful meditation on the complexities of secularization in modernity. His wide-ranging analysis reconstructs the rich intellectual history surrounding secularism and provides a compelling framework for understanding the ambiguous persistence of religious concepts and forms in modern thought, literature, and institutions. This is a superb study, one whose capacious insights move beyond some of the more entrenched divides in the debates over the project of modernity and the ongoing task of the humanities."

--Amanda Anderson, author of The Way We Argue Now: A Study in the Cultures of Theory

"Comprehensive in its scope and timely in its topic, Secularization and Cultural Criticism incisively analyzes the religious heritage of secular thinking within the human sciences today. By focusing on the ambiguous and contradictory development of the secularization process in the modern world, Pecora convincingly demonstrates how religion continues to haunt even the most secular critical efforts to understand our contemporary situation. This remarkable book will help all of us deal more effectively with the complex reemergence of political theology in national and global culture."--Steven Mailloux, author of Reception Histories: Rhetoric, Pragmatism, and American Cultural Politics

"We self-proclaimed moderns (or postmoderns) are never more at risk of flattering self-delusion than when declaring ourselves free from the taint of some 'antiquated' style of thought. Drawing upon a wide range and more than a century's worth of literary, philosophical, and sociological texts, Pecora's book presents a forceful and wholly persuasive case that disrupts the 'secularization story' that has ruled most narratives about the advent of Western modernity. I can think of few works of recent cultural criticism that can compare with this incisive analysis of a whole tradition of modern social thought and representation, and of none at all that speak more trenchantly to the question of religion's persistence--not only among 'jihadists' opposed to U.S.-imposed 'McWorldism, ' or among members of 'the religious Right' dreaming of days that never were, but in covert operation within the very discourses of modernization that purported to 'transcend' religion. Both steeped in tradition and eminently of our moment, this book exemplifies what cultural criticism is for."--James Buzard, author of Disorienting Fiction: The Autoethnographic Work of Nineteenth-Century British Novels

"Vincent Pecora's book is a timely and invigorating study of the predicament of cultural criticism as it confronts a global resurgence of religious movements that contest the process and meaning of secularization. He conducts a masterful analysis of the paradoxes afflicting a criticism that is the unrecognized effect of the secularization it describes. Pecora's work brilliantly illuminates the obstacles that impede the 'unfinished project of modernity' and impressively performs the 'dynamic understanding of secularization' which, he suggests, is cultural criticism's best way forward."--Jerome Christensen, author of Romanticism at the End of History

About the Author

Vincent P. Pecora is the Gordon B. Hinckley Professor of British Literature and Culture at the University of Utah.