On the Possibility of Elsewhere: A Postsecular Reading of Lois Lowry's Giver Trilogy

The paper argues that the three works in Lois Lowry's Giver trilogy—The Giver, Gathering Blue, and Messenger—articulate together a distinctively postsecular social critique, one addressing both ideological secularism and institutionalized faith. In pitting secular and religious assumptions against each other, these works generate a productive critical ambivalence through which delegitimized modes of interpretation are reclaimed as tools for the thinking of selfhood and otherness. They suggest, finally, that the spiritual might be regarded as a function of poetic invention, one with a capacity to disrupt constructions of the real with images of that which might otherwise appear impossible.