Postmodern Belief: American Literature and Religion since, 1960 by Amy Hungerford (review)

634 CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE the images, truths, impressions of that passage requires both development of the eye and the ear in spiritual practice. Since Dyrness' "ear" and "eye' only function as separate organs, and not as body parts working in relationship, Poetic Theology never quite meets its great potential for encouraging devout play between overlapping but distinct circles of representation, of theological ways of being, of flows of hermeneutics, or of unhealthily divided bodies. In the end, Poetic Theology offers an apologia for an approach to Christian life that many Christian lovers of literature will accept without a rationale. Though it wanders a bit around the trailhead, Poetic Theology establishes a path in the direction toward appreciation of beauty on theologically and spiritually common ground. Cheri 1. Larsen Hoeckley Westmont College Postmodern Belief: American Literature and Religion since, 1960. By Amy Hungerford. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010. ISBN 9780691135083. Pp. xxi + 194.$67.50. Amy Hungerford's Postmodern Belief American Literature and Religion since 1960 is an interesting attempt to marry contemporary currents in the study of religion with postmodern practices of literary writing under the category of belief. In a brief study of 140 pages, Professor Hungerford provides an engaging investigation into what she terms "belief in meaninglessness" while combining an intelligent historicism with close readings of literary texts. And though the volume is largely successful in its aims, the argument it posits does not quite meet its own expectations. That is, although Hungerford claims to have put forth the beginnings of "a needed revision of .., religious studies;' her slight simplification of the study of religion leaves her argument less original than she claims (l08). Further, an infelicitous misquotation obscures an interpretive subtlety her argument might have fruitfully pursued, but which remains unrecognized. What results is a book that convincingly (if somewhat unconsciously) applies the established methods of religious studies to literary writing. But the volume does not quite revise the field in the manner it asserts, nor does it realize some of the subtleties it might have uncovered. Hungerford's argument involves two movements, one in the field of American religion and the other in American literature. First, she means to show that, under pressure from secularism and pluralism, religion in America since the midtwentieth century has retreated toward "belief in meaninglessness:' "Belief in BOOK REVIEWS 635 meaninglessness" is an intentionally vague phrase, Hungerford assures us, meant to cover a manner of things: "belief for its own sake, or belief without content, or beliefwhere content is the least important aspect of religious thought and practice" (xiv). This slipperiness ultimately hinders Hungerford's argument, I think, but her rationale for casting such a wide net seems reasonable at first. Assuming that American religion has so embraced a belief in meaninglessness, Hungerford's asks: how should the carefulreader regardthe religious in the greatworksofcontemporary American literature? Self-consciously echoing Matthew Arnold, Hungerford sees postmodern writers as becoming "invested in imagining nonsemantic aspects of language in religious terms" in order to "make their case for literary authority and literary power after modernism" (xiii). That is, belief in meaninglessness for these writers amounts to faith in the form, rather than the content, of language. By assuming the style and structure of religious language but not its doctrinal commitments, postmodern literature arrogates the authority of religion. Meaning "drops away from language ... to create a formal space that we find filled with religious feeling, supernatural power, otherworldly communion, and transcendent authority" so that "literary beliefs are ultimately best understood as a species of religious thought, and their literary practice as a form of religious practice" (xvi). What recent American writers do with literary language is no different, in other words, than what Catholics do with the Latin mass or what charismatics do with glossolalia:all attribute transcendent power to the nonsemantic form of words. Hungerford populates this elusive phrase "belief in meaninglessness" by describing various historical circumstances of late-twentieth century religion alongside readings of roughly contemporaneous literature. The first chapter looks toward President Eisenhower's widely quoted statement that American "government makes no sense ...unless it is founded on a deeply felt religious faithand I don't care what it is"(2). Hungerford deftly...