University of Chicago Press Devotion: Three Inquiries in Religion, Literature, and Political Imagination (TRIOS)

Three religious scholars delve into the potential of literature as a site of radical transformation. We are living in a time of radical uncertainty, faced with serious political, ecological, economic, epidemiological, and social problems. What brings scholars of religion Constance M. Furey, Sarah Hammerschlag, and Amy Hollywood together in this volume is a shared conviction that “reading helps us live with and through the unknown,” including times like these. They argue that what we read and what reading itself demands of us open new ways of imagining our political futures and our lives. Each chapter in this book suggests different ways to characterize the object of devotion and the stance of the devout subject before it. Furey writes about devotion in terms of vivification, energy, and artifice; Hammerschlag in terms of commentary, mimicry, and fetishism; and Hollywood in terms of anarchy, antinomianism, and atopia. They are interested in literature not as providing models for ethical, political, or religious life, but as creating the site in which the possible―and the impossible―transport the reader, enabling new forms of thought, habits of mind, and ways of life. Ranging from German theologian Martin Luther to French-Jewish philosopher Sarah Kofman to American poet Susan Howe, this volume is not just a reflection on forms of devotion and their critical and creative import, but is also a powerful enactment of devotion itself. About the Author Constance M. Furey is professor and chair of religious studies at Indiana University Bloomington. She is the author of Erasmus, Contarini, and the Religious Republic of Letters and Poetic Relations: Faith and Intimacy in the English Reformation. Sarah Hammerschlag is professor of religion and literature in the Divinity School at the University of Chicago. She is the author of The Figural Jew: Politics and Identity in Post-War French Thought and Broken Tablets: Levinas, Derrida, and the Literary Afterlife of Religion. Amy Hollywood is professor of Christian Studies at the Harvard Divinity School. She is the author of The Soul as Virgin Wife: Mechthild of Magdeburg, Marguerite Porete, and Meister Eckhart; Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference, and the Demands of History; and Acute Melancholia and Other Essays.