Lecture
Wednesday, Jun 29, 2011, 7 PM

James Wood

Professor of the Practice of Literary Criticism, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.

The Novel and the New Atheism

Moderator: Prof. Dr. Susan Neiman, Potsdam

In recent years, belief about the existence of God has become sharply divided into warring camps – on one side, fundamentalists and evangelical literalists, on the other side militant atheists (what has been called, in the Anglophone world the New Atheism). Unfortunately, the New Atheism presents a mirror image of literalist religious belief, and neither camp has any interest in the many shades of belief and unbelief that lie between these two fixed positions. Perhaps the novel, that most secular of forms, might help us negotiate these questions, for narrative shows us that belief is not a fixed, stable position, but a way of living; and narrative also dramatizes the ways in which our beliefs are intermittent, interrupted, and often contradictory. In addition, modern novelists, from about 1830 onwards, have frequently struggled with their own belief and unbelief – Melville (who found belief in God almost as difficult as unbelief in God); Dostoevsky; George Eliot (who translated Feuerbach and David Friedrich Strauss into English); Jens Peter Jacobsen (who translated Darwin into Danish); and Tolstoy (who constructed his own, new form of Christianity, in which the question of Jesus’s divinity was irrelevant), come to mind. I shall talk about all these novelists, as well as twentieth-century writers like Camus, Beckett, Coetzee, and Jose Saramago, examining their work in relation to theological questions, both old and new.

James Wood has been a staff writer and book critic at The New Yorker since 2007. He was the chief literary critic at the Guardian, in London, from 1992 to 1995, and a senior editor at The New Republic from 1995 to 2007. His critical essays have been collected in two volumes, The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief (1999) and The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel (2004), the latter of which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He is also the author of a novel, The Book Against God (2003), and a study of technique in the novel, How Fiction Works (2008). He lives in Boston, and teaches half time at Harvard University, where he is Professor of the Practice of Literary Criticism. In 2008, Wood was named one of the top 30 critics in the world by The Economist (Intelligent Life).

The event will be held in English