Our Turn Now? Imitation and the Theological Turn in Literary Studies:

Under a starry sky I was taking a walk, On a ridge overlooking neon cities, With my companion, the spirit of desolation, Who was running around and sermonizing, Saying that I was not necessary, for if not I, then someone else Would be walking here, trying to understand his age. Had I died long ago nothing would have changed. The same stars, cities, and countries Would have been seen with other eyes. The world and its labors would go on as they do. For Christ's sake, get away from me. You've tormented me enough, I said. It's not up to me to judge the calling of men. And my merits, if any, I won't know anyway. --Czeshw Milosz, "Temptation" The call for papers that initiated the 2007 MLA seminar on "The Turn to Religion in Literary Studies" was worded to elicit a variety of possible responses. Yet the brief prompt also seems in its language to offer a partial reading of the "turn to religion"--a greater openness to the study of religious aspects of texts as religious--as well as a comment on the positions of Christian believers within literary study during recent decades: Seminar papers are invited that explore ways in which Christian scholars can participate in the "turn to religion" by strengthening a critical sensibility that weighs the delicate registers of belief and unbelief; by developing more vigorous theoretical paradigms that take religion seriously; and by demonstrating that Christian commitments can lead to greater interpretive clarity. An invitation for papers about how Christians "can participate" in a turn to religion seems in part to suggest that the turn has been undertaken primarily by scholars who do not define themselves as Christian believers or who expressly avoid relating their religious commitments to scholarship. The comparative language searching for more strength, more vigor and seriousness, and greater clarity may indicate a conflict between the "Christian scholars" designed as subjects of the papers, and those assumed to already be comprising the turn. Such ideas are not uncommon in already published pieces that either propose or characterize religious turns in critical theory and literary studies. For example, Jenny Franchot's 1995 piece "Invisible Domain: Religion and American Literary Studies," even while castigating the discipline for seeming to assume that believing and thinking are mutually exclusive and calling for a greater focus on religion, suggests that a neglect of religious subject matter may reflect "how unimportant religion is in the lives of literary scholars" (840). Franchot observes in her article that fear of being cast in "the wrong light" means that scholars consistently translate or demystify the religious ideas of the writers they study (840). Seeking to calm the fears of those who worried that the study of religion would compromise their scholarly position, she insists that there is no requirement that "scholars must themselves adopt the religious insights or practices of those they study" (841). She instead suggests the treatment of religious questions as religious with impartiality and without fear of contagion. Franchot suggests that more and better work on religion ought to be done in Americanist literary studies, though she admits "we rarely study things we don't like, let alone consider ourselves responsible for conveying accounts that are as impartial as possible" (840). The "wrong light" Franchot hints at may be one she casts on earlier scholars: a label marking their work as driven by "hagiographical or polemical impulses that used to characterize some work on religion" (838). Beyond American literary studies, other critics and theorists have worried about the (potentially negative) effects of religious commitments on the integrity of scholarship. In Ken Jackson and Arthur Marotti's 2004 piece "The Turn to Religion in Early Modern English Studies" in Criticism, for example, the authors declare that accounts of religion in Early Modern England were compromised by "literary scholars . …