On literature and the human divine

Erica N. Olson

Many recent authors (such as Kafka, Sartre, Camus, and Beckett) have focused almost solely on the negative aspects of modern life, rather than depicting a broad range of both positive and negative human experiences. Outside of the traditional “West,” the twentieth-century witnessed a great boom in global literature. Cultures and peoples previously ignored on the world stage gained the attention of readers and critics as “postcolonial” literature flourished. But as much as it is now possible to celebrate the richness and diversity of world cultures, many of these works highlight instead the confusion, ruptured identities, and dismal social and economic prospects that cultures face when colliding with the contemporary West. I do not mean to suggest that anxiety is not real and prevalent in contemporary society, or that “postcolonial” clashes between world cultures and the West do not exist. Indeed, the legacy of Western colonization in Africa, Asia, Australia, and the Americas has been one of inequality, instability, warfare, genocide, resource mismanagement, and cultural loss, to name only a few resonating consequences of empire-building. But I think it is important to explore the positive aspects of human culture too, in order to achieve a more complete picture of the contemporary world. In this thesis, I argue that literature containing passages about the “human divine,” among other passages containing a broad spectrum of ideas and experiences, would offer more accurate interpretations of the current historical moment than does literature portraying only negative experiences of modernity. In Chapter One, I explain what I mean by the “human divine,” showing how it appears in historical works like Paradise Lost, Faust, and the Aeneid, and investigating how literature with passages about the “human divine” might describe the twenty-first century. In Chapter Two, I consider the question of form, exploring how passages about the “human divine” might appear within contemporary novels. In Chapter Three, I examine how twenty-first century writers might re-shape ideas from past literature in order to create passages about the “human divine” within their works.

On literature and the human divine

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