Date of Award
7-10-2024
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Degree Type
Dissertation
Abstract
This dissertation foregrounds the experience of religious conversion in literary modernism and makes two interlocking interventions in the study of religion and global Anglophone literature. First, it creates the category of the “modernist converts” for the first time, arguing that the dozens of Anglophone modernist writers who underwent religious conversions should be seen as members of a meaningful collective rather than a set of isolated anomalies. Bringing together the writings of this group, I distill from their work a new understanding of conversion as a poetic event, rather than a narrative process. Thus, the second intervention of this project is to decouple the experience of religious conversion from the conventions of narrative form. This marks a departure from both popular and scholarly understandings of conversion as embedded in narrative, in which the experience of religious transformation is articulated as a linear sequence of events culminating in a decisive change, with a clearly demarcated before and after. I argue that the modernist converts wrote their conversions in ways that attempted to free the experience from the teleological scaffoldings of narrative within which it is most often packaged. The chapters of this dissertation trace a new throughline across Anglophone literature of the long twentieth century, examining a variety of modernist converts and drawing out the complex and mutually constitutive relationship between religious conversion and literary form. Individual chapters spotlight Oscar Wilde, Bhimrao Ambedkar, Mina Loy, Claude McKay, Hope Mirrlees, T. S. Eliot, and David Jones, reading for conversion across an archive of autobiographical, fictional, and poetic texts. Taken as a set, these writers demonstrate that the narrative management of the conversion experience proves insufficient for capturing the ambiguity, contingency, and recursivity at the core of the modern religious conversion. Instead, their work develops the powerful alternative of a poetics of conversion, a literary mode that draws attention to the more quicksilver and startling dimensions of religious experience, attributes which tend to fall by the wayside when conversion is figured only in its most rigidly narrativized forms. Ultimately, I argue that conversion appears in the modernist literary record as a powerful yet subtle strategy for resisting the teleological imperatives of modernity writ large and its attendant narratives of linear forward progress. The modernist converts challenged such teleological schemas of modernity with a poetics of conversion that refracts and recasts dominant paradigms of narratology, secularism, and imperialism, and in doing so produces new vantage points on the sacred.
Language
English (en)
Chair and Committee
Vincent Sherry
Committee Members
Abram Van Engen; Fannie Bialek; J. Dillon Brown; Melanie Micir
Recommended Citation
Jakubowski, Ann Marie, "Towards a Poetics of Conversion: Religious Experience and Modernist Form" (2024). Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 3300.
https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/art_sci_etds/3300