Focusing on North American women poets of the twentieth and twenty-first century, this session interrogates surprising and revealing manners in which religious ideas and motifs live on in modern and contemporary women’s poetry. During a period in North American writing that Fred Moten has described as having a “mantic,” or prophetic, quality, these writers appropriate—to different ends and in different intensities—ideas of martyrdom, suffering, prophecy, embodiment, and confession. The session topic couldn’t come at a more appropriate time: scholars are growing increasingly aware of the role of religion in the construction of nationalist narratives and the incitement of political movements (both aspirational and destructive), as religious-imbibed language and thinking have continued into our so-called secular age.

Religion and literature is, of course, an important and ongoing conversation at the MLA, with past panels including “Religion in Speculative and Science Fiction by Black Women” (MLA 2021), “Religions and Secularisms in the Novel” (MLA 2019), and “Religion and the Early American Novel” (MLA 2018). However, this brief review also demonstrates the ways in which these conversations have tended to constellate around prose. Furthermore, and looking beyond the MLA, discussions of religion and modern literature have tended to focus on nineteenth-century debates around secularism and the crisis of faith in the post-Darwinian era. This proposed session adds a fresh perspective by going both backwards and forwards, to ancient stories and contemporary poets.

This panel will feature 15-minute papers by three scholars at various points in their careers, whose work shares interesting and productive insights into the study of modern and contemporary women’s writing and religion. Given the relevance of these projects to one another and the significant points of overlap and departure, we are confident a rich discussion will follow.

The panel will begin with Sara Judy’s paper, which examines the affective and political afterlives of the prophet Jonah in Anne Sexton’s poetry. In her collection All My Pretty Ones (1962) Sexton references Jonah’s watery exile in order to instruct her reader in the political utility of righteous anger, a didactic move more often seen in overtly political poetry. In an under-studied essay, Jewish philosopher Gershom Scholem writes the book of Jonah is “the very key to understanding the prophetic idea in general,” both ironic and earnest in its pedagogical purpose. Reading Sexton in this way challenges assumptions about the confessional nature of her poetry, placing her in conversation with other religiously inspired political poets, including Muriel Rukeyser, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Sonia Sanchez.

Christos Hadjiyiannis will then turn to Sharon Olds’ preservation and appropriation of female Christian ideas of suffering and redemption in her debut collection, Satan Says (1980). This paper will read Olds’s poetry in the light of late antique Byzantine female martyr narratives such as 2nd-century Acts of Thecla and the 3rd-century Passion of Perpetua and Felicity: stories of women martyred in the Christian sense of the word. But the female martyrs commemorated in these texts are also abused daughters, harassed fiancées, imprisoned mothers—in short, fetishized objects of male desire. Focusing on the poem “Satan Says,” the paper will show how these ancient texts challenge patriarchal structures and affirm the possibility for transformation in Olds’s twentieth-century writing, as well as in the visual art of Marina Abramović and the poetry of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha.

Finally, Cynthia R. Wallace will examine the religious afterlives of the philosopher-mystic Simone Weil, famous for her attraction to a cruciform Christianity, in Annie Dillard, Adrienne Rich, and M. NourbeSe Philip. Each of these women writers takes up Weil in distinct ways: Dillard imagines a writer protagonist whose attention follows Weil’s kenotic ethics of attention in Waiting for God (1950); Rich likewise borrows Weil’s sacrificial ethics of attention but questions its gendered and religious self-diminishment; and Philip’s writing evinces another long engagement with Weil’s appeal to justice but rejects outright the call to an ethics predicated on self-emptying. Philip’s stance is consonant with other Black women writers and theologians, including Delores Williams, who reject rather than redeem the Christian ideal of martyrdom. Ultimately, this last paper argues that attending to the intersectional particularities of social location is an essential practice as we discuss how modern women writers appropriate religious ideas.

Taken together, these papers interrogate the ways in which modern and contemporary women writers have appropriated—and in so doing challenged as much as they embraced—religious ideas for ethical and political ends. In doing so, the religious afterlives reinvigorated by these women poets seek to highlight and ultimately upend structures of social, racial, and political power.