God and Modern Literature

3 Credits.

Modernity has often been described as the age in which God has died. But concern with the nature and experience of divinity pervades modern literary texts. In this course we will sample a variety of works from the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries that investigate the possibilities and limitations of religious belief under the conditions of modernity. Authors to be read include Kierkegaard, G. M. Hopkins, George Eliot, Friedrich Nietzsche, Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, Hermann Hesse, C. S. Lewis, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Solvej Balle, and Jon Fosse. This class counts towards the requirements of a text-based course for the minor in Comparative Thought and Literature.