I’m really happy we were modern for a while, or am I being ironic?

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It’s been a week now since my first experiment in live blogging the NEMLA conference. Time flies when you come home and get back to work and imagine a life in which you have time on a week night to do something you really want to do. Let me say, first, I really appreciate all of those who followed the fun on the blog and on Twitter (oh, I’m totally in now, http://www.twitter.com/jfitz81). It really meant a lot that while I was in Boston and since I’ve been back people have been asking how it went and all. Really, thank you for caring.

As to how it went…well, it went…well. I mentioned in my grossly uninformative last post that we had what I referred to as an “African lit” size crowd. For the un-initiated, “African lit” means African Literature and was the subject of the panel on which I was presenting. And for the slightly less un-initiated, an African lit size crowd means that there were four people at our panel. To offer a little bit of perspective, however, there were over 15 sessions during the 3-day conference and each session had over 15 panels. As a rule I don’t do math if I don’t have to, but that means there was a lot of competition. And though my panel-mates (colleagues is probably a better, but not more humorous, word) and I are completely convinced of the awesomeness and importance of our subject, it turns out the authors that have movies made about them still reign supreme (freaking Sylvia Plath).

I would like to revisit, however, a theme that I picked up early on in the conference and that followed right through to the last panel I attended. That is, back on Day One I was struck by the willingness, and even the necessity it would seem, to engage in conversation about religion and Christianity in particular. This is striking to me because, as you probably know, intellectuals and scholars aren’t supposed to care about religion. The enlightenment and ensuing modern period pretty much killed god making way for bigger and better things, like Reason. And yet, here we were, 2009, Boston, Massachusetts in the highest concentration of PhD’s that I’ve ever been around and we can’t keep God’s name off our lips.

Here’s a brief synopsis. The first panel I went to was called Orality and Post-colonialism and for the most part dealt with those parts of the world that have a strong oral tradition and have been colonized. There was talk of Africa, India, Arab regions and the Caribbean. But then there was the guy who took as his subject the Pentecostal movement in 19^th century America. All of the sudden we’re talking about speaking in tongues and testimonies, and not in an altogether demeaning way either. It was a rather interesting discussion about testimony as an American mark on orality. Fascinating.

Then there was the madness and modernism session which featured Plath and Woolf and not much about God. Then, I went to a session on religion, the secular and literature. This may have been the best panel I attended. It was chaired by a faculty member from BU’s incredible Religion and Literature Department who gave a brilliant introduction to the interaction between religion and literature by tackling the Romantics, and had three excellent scholars taking on the question of the place of religion in the face of a traditionally secular field. So there papers about the Christianity in Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road,” excellent book if you haven’t read it. There was a discussion of “Heart of Darkness” by Joseph Conrad (the horror, the horror). Finally (though I’m not sure he was last to present, but I wanted to save it for last), there was a close reading of the “Left Behind” books in light of postmodernity. It is on this discussion that I’d like to hang for a moment.

The basic point that was made here, or at least what I got from it, was “Yes those books are written so poorly it’ll make you want to gouge your eyes out, but what they at least are is sincere in the face of the pervasive irony that dominates our postmodern culture.” Again, and amazingly, the Left Behind books, all 17 of them, were treated with a dignity here that I’m positive I would not have offered them and that made everyone in the room, no matter what their views on Christianity, feel overwhelming respect for the presenter. Anyways that’s how I felt. But there was a point made during his presentation, in fact it may have been the point of his presentation, that the constant irony with which we all communicate with one another is a trademark of postmodernism and creates a poisonous environment for religion. Thus the merit of the Left Behind books, at least they’re sincere unlike pretty much all of the literature, television and movies of late. He spent most of his time talking, particularly, about television series like “30 Rock,” “The Office,” and “Scrubs” as prime examples of overly ironic.

So, I agreed with him, pretty much throughout. Except, in one tiny point and that is the assertion that postmodernism, because of this penchant for irony is a more hostile environment toward religion then was modernism. With this, I disagree. I’m pretty sure I’d rather talk about religion with someone who thought I was crazy for believing what I believed but, “you now, whatever dude, I guess you can laugh at me on judgment day if I’m wrong,” then the modern alternative which would’ve just dismissed me as an irrational, unreasoning nincompoop (my spell-checker did not flag that word…either it is as dumbfounded as I am that I actually used it in writing, or it’s the correct spelling).

Much is said about the “anything goes” attitude of postmodernism and how this is dangerous atmosphere for a religion that claims exclusivity on the Pearly Gates, but I feel very confident that it is actually a healthier environment for open discussion about faith, and, further, that the best parts of postmodernism are little more than a twenty-first century premodernism which is actually quite favorable to a pre-modern, pre- enlightenment faith like Christianity.

I have a lot more to say about this, but I think I’ll hold some of it for an article I’m working on that may end up being published in one of my new favorite online reads, The Curator. Speaking of favorite online reads, between my recent adoption of Twitter and the fact that I have been compulsively adding RSS feeds to my Google Reader I have been discovering a lot of really great sites about books, culture, faith and the connection of all three. Feel free to hit me up with a recommendation if you’d like. And I’ll just toss one out here, a great site full of lists of books…two things I love, lists and books: Flashlight Worthy Books. Check it out.

As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts, particularly on your sense of the interaction between religion and pomo (as I sometimes, obnoxiously, refer to it). And thanks for reading.

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