ABSTRACT
Is there a “domain of knowledge” that correlates with “Religion and Literature”? This chapter considers pedagogical choices when opening and closing an undergraduate course in religion and modern narrative fiction. Initially, students may find the most convincing reasons for bringing religion and literature together to be historical. However, religion and literature also pose questions of each other hermeneutically and phenomenologically, theologically and ethically, entailing experiences of origin and limitation, order and chaos, identity and transformation. Juxtaposed, religion and literature make milieus of language, memory, matter, and spirit. The course follows an arc from early twentieth-century fiction and theory reflecting religion as a fascinating “problem,” mid-to-late twentieth-century works whose traditional beliefs and practices challenge modernity, ending with “contemporary and critical quests for religious meaning” in recent fiction. The chapter is occasioned by a decision to set aside Conrad’s Heart of Darkness for Hesse’s Demian as the course begins. It concludes with an impending choice, whether to replace Yann Martel’s Life of Pi as the course ends. These three works are discussed in terms of how form and style project a world, which transfigures traditions into religious questions, which in turn may elicit hermeneutical and ethical encounters with readers.
