A case for religious criticism

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay returns to Edward Said’s juxtaposition of secular and religious criticism in The World, the Text, and the Critic (1983) to ask what benefits, if any, religious criticism might offer to the study of literature and culture in the twenty first century. Secular and religious, in Said’s catachrestic usage, do not describe specific traditions or historical structures of feeling or any particular set of orthodoxies; rather, they describe distinct thinking practices. The key difference is that religious criticism, in practice, stands on an appeal to some set of foundational principles, while secular criticism does not make any such stand. Looking at examples of criticism with religious valences in the works of Fredric Jameson and Hortense Spillers, the essay argues that religious criticism’s inherent commitment to collectivity and morality place it in necessary dialectical tension with secular criticism and thus render it integral to the work of critique as practiced by scholars of literature and culture today.