<bold>Syncretism and Spirituality in the 1960s:=20
Charting the Postmodern Crossing of U.S. Literature and Religious
Studies
</bold>
This proposed special sesssion will chart the way in which texts of the
1960s represented the emerging force of the postmodern religious
aesthetic. As factions within the decade embraced syncretism and new
ideas of spirituality, key pieces of literature documented, fueled, and
created its movement away from organized religion towards more subjective
practices. This new syncretism did not destroy the system of religion but
altered it by expanding its own boundaries. As a result, the 1960s were a
time when religion was not collapsed but transformed from within as the
secular world both enhanced and devalued its power forever. Thus the
distinction between secular and sacred texts blurred immeasurably.
Panelists will look to postmodern religious studies and literature to
analyze an important shift of a decade more often identified by its
revolts for political and civil rights. The session seeks to find works
created in the 1960s that both mirrored and acted as a catalyst for
religious and spiritual trends. Although literature has
attacked/critiqued organized religion for decades, and even centuries,
the 1960s in the United States represents a time when literary ideals and
the actions of the populace were synthesized in a capacity never seen
before. Burgeoning ideas of spirituality evident in such disparate
realms as Vatican II, the Civil Rights Movement, Death of God theology,=20
and the counterculture discovered a foundation and support in works from
Barth, Cox, Kerouac, Kesey, Pynchon, Reed, Vonnegut, etc. Furthermore,
this crossing of literature and religion has been augmented by the rise
of poststructuralist and postmodern theories. The panel will embrace the
blurred lines between sacred and secular to question what is and what is
not a 1960s religious text. In asking these questions the session
seeks to chronicle the effects of these religious and spiritual
transformations on the culture of both the 1960s and the decades that
followed.
By March 12, 1999 please send brief vitae, 500 word abstracts, and/or
completed papers to:
Paul Michael Reifenheiser
Department of English
Florida State University
Tallahassee FL, 32301
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