The Postmodern Sacred: Popular Culture Spirituality in the Science Fiction, Fantasy and Urban Fantasy Genres

Abstract

McAvan, Emily. Postmodern Sacred: Popular Culture Spirituality in Science Fiction, Fantasy and Urban Fantasy Genres. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2012. 194 pp. $40.00 (USD. paperback) ISBN: 978-0-7864-6388-6. Ebook ISBN: 978-0-7864-9282-4 premise of Emily McAvan's dissertation-based book, Postmodern Sacred: Popular Culture Spirituality in Science Fiction, Fantasy and Urban Fantasy Genres, is elementary to many studies of culture: culture both represents and contributes to ongoing formulation and reformulation of cultural values and beliefs. More unique is her focus on theme of New Age religion and as it is expressed in particular films, television shows, and novels. McAvan cites Oprah's consumerist approach to New Age and references commodification of many aspects of religion, but she evidently coined the postmodern as a substitute for popular culture spirituality to embrace her favoured theorists of postmodern. These theorists, all introduced in chapters one, two, and three, include Baudrillard, Derrida, Jameson, and Lyotard, who are associated with concepts of hyperreality, transcendental signified, pastiche, and collapse of metanarrative respectively. She regards her cited texts as examples, or as incorporating examples, of these concepts, and concepts as characteristics of postmodern sacred. Of profane, she argues that computer-generated imagery has collapsed distinction between it and its traditional opposite, sacred (70), such that monsters and deities are easily converted from one into other (78). In addition, although almost all of her texts are chosen from descriptively unproblematic (at least in this study) genres of fantasy, fantastic horror, and science fiction, she prefers to call them unreal fiction. She takes care to establish her view of relationship between these genres and literature produced by Christian fundamentalists and evangelicals: The science fiction/fantasy text produced for entertainment and evangelical text produced for proselytizing are very much two sides of same coin. first is made for profane purposes and stages disavowed belief in an overtly fictional way, while latter states overt belief in a disavowed fictional way (3). coinage of unreal fiction is not about relationship between science fiction and Christian fundamentalist literature, however, but is instead intended to emphasize connection between familiar types of fiction and use of unreal computer-generated characters and contexts, and, further, manner in which these latter effects may variously represent and fulfill New Age emphasis on personal experience as basis for all true spirituality--for both filmic characters and flesh-and-blood viewers. elements and entities that create that experience vary with films, television shows, and novels under discussion. …