Secular Trouble: Regulating Reality in Non-Fiction Literatures

Abstract

Abstract: This essay examines some of the conventions of secular narration that shape mainstream journalism, scholarship, and other non-fiction literatures. By bracketing the agency of non-natural forces, the conventions generate an authoritative authorial position outside the narrative, a worldly kind of God's-eye view or "higher ground," and generates secular knowledge that can be exchanged by diverse supernaturalists and naturalists. Similar conventions are also at work in much mainstream American fiction. Indeed, abiding by such secularizing conventions is part of what defines a literature as mainstream.