Secularization and Cultural Criticism

"At a moment of frightening emergency for Edward Said's secular ideal, Vincent Pecora offers an ingenious and innovative defense: he concedes the ideal's ambiguities, fills in its compromising history of continuing engagement with religious tradition, and sets up a subtle and judicious negotiation with its detractors in which they too are asked to concede their deep complicity with the secularism they oppose. This work of high and generous intelligence shows us interdisciplinarity in the most visibly valuable sense."

--Bruce Robbins, author of Feeling Global: Internationalism in Distress

"Vincent Pecora's important new book offers a powerful meditation on the complexities of secularization in modernity. His wide-ranging analysis reconstructs the rich intellectual history surrounding secularism and provides a compelling framework for understanding the ambiguous persistence of religious concepts and forms in modern thought, literature, and institutions. This is a superb study, one whose capacious insights move beyond some of the more entrenched divides in the debates over the project of modernity and the ongoing task of the humanities."

--Amanda Anderson, author of The Way We Argue Now: A Study in the Cultures of Theory
"Comprehensive in its scope and timely in its topic, Secularization and Cultural Criticism incisively analyzes the religious heritage of secular thinking within the human sciences today. By focusing on the ambiguous and contradictory development of the secularization process in the modern world, Pecora convincingly demonstrates how religion continues to haunt even the most secular critical efforts to understand our contemporary situation. This remarkable book will help all of us deal more effectively with the complex reemergence of political theology in national and global culture."--Steven Mailloux, author of Reception Histories: Rhetoric, Pragmatism, and American Cultural Politics
"We self-proclaimed moderns (or postmoderns) are never more at risk of flattering self-delusion than when declaring ourselves free from the taint of some 'antiquated' style of thought. Drawing upon a wide range and more than a century's worth of literary, philosophical, and sociological texts, Pecora's book presents a forceful and wholly persuasive case that disrupts the 'secularization story' that has ruled most narratives about the advent of Western modernity. I can think of few works of recent cultural criticism that can compare with this incisive analysis of a whole tradition of modern social thought and representation, and of none at all that speak more trenchantly to the question of religion's persistence--not only among 'jihadists' opposed to U.S.-imposed 'McWorldism, ' or among members of 'the religious Right' dreaming of days that never were, but in covert operation within the very discourses of modernization that purported to 'transcend' religion. Both steeped in tradition and eminently of our moment, this book exemplifies what cultural criticism is for."--James Buzard, author of Disorienting Fiction: The Autoethnographic Work of Nineteenth-Century British Novels