Blasphemous Modernism

Reviews / Votes

In its explorations of religion and blasphemy, Steve Pinkerton's Blasphemous Modernism: The 20th-Century Word Made Flesh interrogates and challenges common understandings of the period as uninterested in religion's primacy: it 'attends to the complex relationship in modernist texts between words, the Word, and the flesh'. Most compellingly, Pinkerton points to the ways that 'blasphemy is a barometer and a mechanism of power, a discourse governed by the powerful but also occasionally usurped by the marginalized in politically significant ways' * The Year's Work in English Studies * The author has done something undeniably important in explicating the blasphemous play of several important modernist artists. He has also opened the door for consideration of the
nature and function of blasphemy in the work of authors who do sometimes validate the truth claims of religion - figures such as Flannery O'Connor, Graham Greene, Shusaku Endo, and Marilynne Robinson. One of the greatest accomplishments of Blasphemous Modernism is that it forces us to return to the scene of some of modernism's greatest crimes against God and ask, not for the first time, if any crime were actually committed. * Martin Lockerd, Modernism/Modernity * Pinkerton's study is textually focused and compiles a lively and readable collection of examples of blasphemy. ... an important contribution to rethinking the engagement of modernist writers with religion, and makes a persuasive case for the importance of blasphemy as a category of study in its own right. * Imogen Woodberry, Los Angeles Review of Books * Steve Pinkerton's Blasphemous Modernism is an important study of modernist writers' continuing engagement with religion in the early twentieth century * an era that is sometimes anachronistically treated as totally secularized. Pinkerton shows how writers from the mainstream and the margins of the modernist movement attacked religion because they took it so seriously. This impressive work has significant implications for our current cultural scene, in which accusations of blasphemy continue to have real-world consequences.Pericles Lewis, Yale University * At last! An intuitive and probing analysis of blasphemy and modernist writers, skillfully accomplished by exploring the real-world context of their works. This penetrating and lucid book pries apart the fundamental paradox of blasphemy within the modernist epoch * that the most forthright blasphemy effectively reinforces the power of the sacred over the imagination in a supposedly godless age.David Nash, Oxford Brookes University *