The Desire for Utopia in the Critical Study of Religion
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Syracuse University SURFACE Dissertations - ALL SURFACE June 2017 The Desire for Utopia in the Critical Study of Religion Holly A. White Syracuse University Follow this and additional works at: https://surface.syr.edu/etd Part of the Arts and Humanities Commons Recommended Citation White, Holly A., "The Desire for Utopia in the Critical Study of Religion" (2017). Dissertations - ALL. 681. https://surface.syr.edu/etd/681 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the SURFACE at SURFACE. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations - ALL by an authorized administrator of SURFACE. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Abstract This dissertation argues that the critical methods developed by and used within the field of religious studies can be reimagined as an expression of the modern desire for Utopia. It investigates how applications of critical social theory occlude the category of experience either deliberately or through methodological slight. Utopia addresses this problematic of representing the existential dimension of social life through its particular formulation of social contradiction. Analyzing Utopia's own representational situation within modernity affords scholars in religion a means to consider their investments in and desires for representing society as a totality that creates the conditions for and anticipates resolutions to these contradictions. THE DESIRE FOR UTOPIA IN THE CRITICAL STUDY OF RELIGION by Holly A. White B.A. Baldwin-Wallace College, 1995 M.A.Th.S. Bethany Theological Seminary, 2004 M.Phil. Syracuse University, 2010 Dissertation Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Religion Syracuse University June 2017 Copyright © Holly Ann White 2017 All Rights Reserved Acknowledgments Above all, I would like to thank M. Gail Hamner. Her dedication to teaching and mentoring introduced me to a world of knowledge production that, previous to arriving at Syracuse University, I had little exposure or access to. This dissertation would have not come about without her tireless support, her timely feedback, and her commitment to turning me on, over and over again, to the pleasures of ideas, the possibilities of language, and the effect of scholarship on landscapes, bodies, and futures. I am grateful for the time that has passed together and the opportunities I may be given because of her investment in my formation as a scholar. It is a rare privilege to have one's thought carefully considered. The particular configuration of Zachary J. Braiterman, James W. Watts, Philip P. Arnold, Anne Munly, and Crystal L. Bartolovich for this committee reflects both a depth of scholarship in relationship to these particular questions of Utopia and a line through my own biography at Syracuse. Each contributed to this project before it was a prospectus. I am especially grateful to Professor Braiterman whose attention to form turned me into a better reader and writer. His kindness has also made many difficult moments bearable. I also am ever-grateful for friendships that have provided space, reflection, and solace. Dena Pence, Sharon Terry, Tyra Twomey-Smith, Margo Shea, Rocky Lewis, and Paul Morris each have labored with me—as midwives and fellow knowledge workers— in bringing this project forward to be shared with others. Many more friends, teachers, and family have supported me along the way, but none has had more to do with the completion of this project than Alex Coventry, whose companionship I treasure beyond words. iv Table of Contents Introduction The Desire for Utopia in the Critical Study of Religion......................................................1 Chapter One From Locative to Utopian: The Modern Project of Critical Religious Studies.................21 Chapter Two Representing Utopia, Representing Desire: Utopia Theory and Method Reconsidered...85 Chapter Three Utopian Literature: Formal Conventions and Figuration.................................................149 Chapter Four Utopia as Method: Encountering Representational Dilemmas........................................214 Bibliography....................................................................................................................253 Vita...................................................................................................................................265 v 1 Introduction The Desire for Utopia in the Critical Study of Religion In this dissertation, I contend that the critical methods developed by and used within the field of religious studies can be reimagined as an expression of the modern desire for Utopia. Utopia indexes a host of ambivalent hopes and dreams, and in its colloquial sense, has little in common with the methods of historicization, ideology critique or realist politics that contribute to this branch of religious studies. In looking closely at Utopia's appeal, I have been struck by how it generates an equal dose of frustration as it represents social contradictions without presenting viable resolutions. Thus, in its representation or figural form, Utopia brings about a new kind of experience for readers, one that allows readers to feel social contradiction and to sense, at least partially, the social obstacles to resolving those contradictions. Considering how successful Utopia is in generating and representing the frustrated feelings of the social present, it is odd how its scholarship, in its dependence on social theory, ignores or occludes subjective, existential feeling altogether. This disjunction between the work of this literary figure and the means of analyzing it forms the basis of my dissertation. Critical methods in the study of religion share this problem of representing the social present within their own representations of social totality. My turn to Fredric Jameson and his psychoanalytic and Marxian approach to Utopia exposes this investment in social totality as a desire imbued with Utopia's ambivalence. When held up as a Utopian form, 2 critical religious studies reflects obliquely the existential and experiential contents it has otherwise eschewed. Colloquially, Utopia signals a place of perfection and implies a good life lived in harmony with others but which is ultimately impossible. As a neologism created by Thomas More in 1516 to name both the island and the title of his satire by the same name, Utopia carries conflict within its etymology. The root, "topos" is Greek for "place or region" with the prefix of "ou" that negates, generating "non-place." Translated into Latin as U-topia, the word shifts to its homonym, eu-topos or “good place."1 More's two- part book is known for its travel narrative of a land far away whose inhabitants seem inordinately happy. The reality of the place and the happiness of the inhabitants, however, is undermined throughout as the main narrator, Hythloday, whose name translates from Latin as “nonsense peddler,” regales his audience with a picture of a far away place with a quirky resemblance to their hometown of London. Utopia as a word has been, since this time, positively and negatively valenced, made overdetermined by use across different historical moments and for different discursive communities. Utopia signals a host of associations that may make it unstable as a category. Instead of moving from Utopia because of this ambivalence, my project takes its ambivalence as an occasion for analysis. Utopia's contradictory character actually presented a problem for the field of religious studies in a formulation by Jonathan Z. Smith. Early in his career, Smith 1 According to Robert Adams introduction to More's text, translations from the Latin into English present a particular challenge to the translator. The translator must preserve the complex linguistic innuendoes that saturate the text while also making the text colloquial as it would have been for his intended audience of highly-educated humanists. For these reasons, I have found annotations to More's text useful such as found in Adam's version. The footnotes explain the word play and provide supplementary texts that both show the intellectual atmosphere of More’s time and also explain the impact of his text on future authors of the genre. Thomas More, Utopia, ed. Robert M. Adams, Norton Critical Edition (New York: Norton, 1975). 3 proposes that religion carries within it a tension towards place-making or orienting enterprises and a resistance or refusal to orient. In several early essays, Smith opposed the "locative" tendency of religion to a "utopian" one. Smith notes that while myths and rituals center or help the practitioner of religion locate or find place, religious traditions also preserve the role of chaos through characters and rituals. The force or source of this chaotic element is itself difficult to locate in Smith, and over time, Smith tries on various terms to mark this movement or function that is not towards place or emplacement, claiming in different essays how chaos, incongruity, or disjunction function in relation to religious myths as well as to religion scholarship itself. In one account in the essay "The Wobbling Pivot," Smith lands on the term "utopian" to describe the "no-place" perspective that values being out of place, out of orientation, to resist the confinement of the locative. 2 Through other iterations of this problematic of religion's relation to place, Smith eventually moves on from "utopia," turning to "incongruity" and then "difference" to signal the tensions of human existence,