Introduction: Literature after the Death of God

Abstract

In 1965, J. Hillis Miller followed his book on Victorian poetry, The Disappearance of God, with Poets of Reality, a book on modernism. In the Introduction he wrote that “if the disappearance of God is presupposed by much Victorian poetry, the death of God is the starting point for many twentieth century writers.” In much modernist literature, as Miller described it, God, who was “once the creative sun, the power establishing the horizon where heaven and earth come together, becomes an object of thought like any other. When man drinks up the sea he also drinks up God, the creator of the sea” (2–3). God, it seemed, was now truly dead, and modernism had sounded the death knell. In locating modernism in this way, Miller was restating a familiar thesis. According to this narrative, modernist literature began from a newly perceived position of godlessness and was either creating an art out of the resulting nihilism or was creating a replacement for religion. These two positions—one negative and one positive—are represented in the words and works of modernists themselves. For Wallace Stevens, whose poetry often focused on the theme of re-creating lost religious ideas, God was the “supreme poetic idea” and “in the absence of a belief in God, the mind turns to its own creations” (Opus Posthumous 186). For Marcel Duchamp, on the other hand, it was “mad foolishness to have made up the idea of God” (Cabanne 107), and his art celebrates the meaninglessness of a godless world. However, more recent theories have recast the death of God as something more complex and creative; since the time of Miller’s book, both philosophers and theologians have come to see Nietzsche’s negation of the divine as more than just an antithesis to faith.KeywordsModernist LiteratureShallow PoolModernist WorkInvoluntary MemoryNegative TheologyThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.