BeSec · Beyond the Secular: Narrativizing religious change in contemporary German novels
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2016-03-01 → 2018-02-28
- EU contribution
- €195,455
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF-EF-ST
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Results in brief
Beyond the Secular: Narrativizing religious change in contemporary German novels
The project “Beyond the Secular” studied changing assumptions about religion and secularity in present-day Germany. It analysed contemporary novels, poems, films and plays to show how such fictional representations build on public debates about, for instance, the role of religion in the public sphere, the integration of Muslim citizens, and the religious or secular identity of the German nation. While current public debates often posit an antagonism between faith and religion, on the one hand, and reason and modernity on the other, the fictional depictions studied in this project construct positions in between secular and religious world views, deliberately blurring the distinctions between such positions and emphasizing the continuity between secular and religious horizons. The main goal of the project was to offer the first ever comprehensive study of religion in contemporary German literature, taking into account Christian, Muslim, Jewish, and non-faith based perspectives as well as alternative, fluid, and syncretistic religion. A second goal consisted in studying, from a comparative and interdisciplinary point of view, literary narrativizations of religion and the secular in dialogue with relevant social and cultural environments, and as catalysts of the on-going de-secularization of modernity. Finally, the project was designed to show, from the perspective of cultural and cognitive narratology, how contemporary fiction engages the minds of individual readers as well as the collective imaginary in the context of ongoing discussions about religion and secularity.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
The death of God and the disenchantment of the world are central to self-presentations of modernity. At the dawn of the third millennium, however, the worldwide growth of religious fundamentalisms as well as the pluralisation and individualization (but not the disappearance) of faith in the West suggest the need for a more nuanced understanding of the relation between secularity, modernity and religion. This is not only a matter for empirical research in Social, Political and Religious Studies. “Modernity,” “secularity” and “religion” are, in important ways, interpretive categories shaped by cultural narratives through which individuals and societies understand their world. The project “Beyond the Secular” studies a defined corpus of such narratives: contemporary German-language novels which articulate non-secular and religious experiences and worldviews. Through an interdisciplinary methodology combining close reading and narratological analysis with contextual readings in religious sociology, theology, and political philosophy, the project seeks to determine the potential of literature for the perception and narrativization of religious change in late modern societies.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- UNIVERSITY OF WARWICK · COVENTRYCoordinatorUnited Kingdom
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union