Engaging with – but not taking for granted – the premises of the so-called “post-secularist” turn, which insists on the persistence of structures of religious belief and affiliation in an ostensibly secularized world, this panel interrogates the secularist premises of criticism and the novel. It does so, variously, by examining the roots of contemporary criticism and theory in Christian and Jewish thought and their histories of interpretive practice; imagining instances in which literary studies’ secularist doctrine comes into conflict with the discipline’s globalist aims; or when that doctrine cannot adequately account for the forms and temporalities of the novel or the ways we read, perform, and experience criticism. We will approach these and related issues from several theoretical, historical, and geographical angles in order not simply to test the limits of the secularism of criticism and the novel, but also to ask why these two forms, rather than others, have borne the weight of the secular in literary studies. Why, in short, is it the theological that gets us to ask what the novel and criticism have in common?

Farah Bakaari’s “Secular Form and Religious Imagination” opens the session, reading Sudanese-Scottish novelist Leila Aboulela’s work for the ways its Muslim framework disrupts typical expectations of novelistic form. Aboulela has admitted that upon reading Jane Eyre, she did not understand the novel’s central conflict. If Mr. Rochester were Muslim, she averred, he could have married them both. Aboulela’s staged bewilderment unearths the Christian-centric logic of realist narrative form, as well as the reading practices it engenders. But Aboulela’s novels themselves also enact this estrangement. Invested in the Victorian marriage plot, her novels often center devout Muslims who embrace cosmopolitan publics without relinquishing religious doctrine. Bakaari examines how and why Aboulela’s novels frustrate her readers whose desire for a happy ending (in the form of marriage), betrays the secular unconscious of the realist novel which excludes Islam from its formal futures.

Timothy Bewes’s “Quantum Simultaneity and Novelistic Time: Using Maggie Nelson to Read Jennifer Egan” then interrogates dominant understandings of novelistic time by turning to Benedict Anderson’s famous claim that the “Messianic time” of great epic narratives is replaced in modernity by the "homogeneous empty time" of the novel, where simultaneity occurs no longer allegorically, across history, but by mere temporal coincidence -- a time “measured by clock and calendar.” But what form of time succeeds the calendar time of the realist novel? Reading Maggie Nelson alongside Jennifer Egan’s novel A Visit From the Goon Squad, Bewes’s paper will argue that Walter Benjamin’s “homogeneous empty time” has been succeeded by a chronological and theological formation that we may call “quantum time”: “a simultaneity that can only be explained using principles of quantum mechanics” (Egan). But is this formation the occasion of a new dialectical image, or its absolute negation?

In “On Being Convinced: the Qur’an as Method,” Pardis Dabashi shows that while Judeo-Christian thought and interpretive histories are at the genealogical root of literary-theoretical method – including in the narrative-theoretical and Frankfurt-school frameworks at work in the previous two presentations – Islam has largely been relegated to the domain of content. We study Muslims, Dabashi argues, but we mostly don’t read through Islam. That is because of what many have argued is the conflation (even, Dabashi claims, within the history of postcolonial studies) of Islam with the absence of critical detachment. Dabashi reads the Qur’an, the Muslim holy scripture, both for the theory of textual interpretation that it offers, and for the unique distinction it draws between belief and nonbelief, a distinction that provides a way of understanding what the doctrine of secular criticism conveniently disavows: the contingent, unreasoned, and transformative power of what she calls “critical experience.”