Bahrawi, Nazry (2013) Sacred impulses, sacrilegious worlds : postsecular intimations in Graham Greene and Naguib Mahfouz. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

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Abstract

Inspired by Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age (2007), this thesis reconsiders
‘the secular’ from within the discipline of literature and theology,
employing comparative literature as a methodology. Focusing on the
writings of two modern authors of religious doubt, Graham Greene and
Naguib Mahfouz, I argue that the secular as an ontological category is from
its inception post secular. In the first theoretical part of this thesis, I explore
religious utopianism, and argue against the notion that utopianism is a
uniquely ‘Western’ concept by outlining its prevalence in non Western
societies. Then, I theorise modern intimations of the secular as four
dichotomies: faith/reason, this worldliness/otherworldliness,
personal/communal and freewill/determinism. In doing so,I draw parallels
between ideas of the secular from Western philosophers such as Immanuel
Kant and Friedrich Nietzsche and classical Islamic thinkers like Ibn Sina
and al-Farabi. Drawing from the concepts of ‘religious utopianism’ and
‘secular dichotomies’, I develop a comparative literary lens known as
utopian theologics to explore secular narratives in the selected works of
Greene and Mahfouz. The second part of this thesis applies utopian
theologics, by first historicising the secular from the socio-political and
biographical spheres of the two writers to map out their ‘lifeworlds’ in the
Habermasian sense of the word. More elaborately, I embark on a close
reading analysis of the selected works according to the dichotomies
identified to explore the way their conventional hierarchical orders have been reversed, or rendered irrelevant by hybridisation. Finally, I conclude
that the secular disposition, as intimated in the novels, falls apart when its
polemics are investigated, though its sense of lasting realness in the
modern world is fuelled by perceptions of religion’s seeming antithesis to
the idea of human agency. The postsecular narratives that govern the
selected works also suggest that humanity has an inclination for ‘sacred
impulses’ despite the advent of ‘sacrilegious worlds’.

Item Type:	Thesis or Dissertation (PhD)
Subjects:	P Language and Literature > PJ Semitic P Language and Literature > PR English literature
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH):	Greene, Graham, 1904-1991 -- Criticism and interpretation, Maḥfūẓ, Najīb, 1911-2006 -- Criticism and interpretation, Postsecularism, Secularism in literature
Official Date:	January 2013
Dates:	Date Event January 2013 Submitted
Institution:	University of Warwick
Theses Department:	Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies
Thesis Type:	PhD
Publication Status:	Unpublished
Supervisor(s)/Advisor:	Bassnett, Susan
Sponsors:	Muslim Religious Council of Singapore; Muhammadiyah Association of Singapore
Extent:	iv, 372 leaves.
Language:	eng

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