American literary critic John A. McClure is the author of series of works concerning postsecularism, including Partial Faiths. Postsecular Fiction in the Age of Pynchon, and Morrison, his main study in this field. The article emphasizes the “literary” character of his postsecular thought. Its main goal is to reconstruct and analyze McClure’s postsecularism by focusing on his interpretations of North American novels.
 

This essay is an extended analysis of two aphorisms: Angelus Silesius’ sacred epigram on “the rose without why” and Paul Celan’s sentence on the hidden god of the poem. While there seems to be no direct connection between them, I nonetheless interpret them as belonging to – or even stronger, creating – the same paradigm of a typically modern religiosity which I call here a literary cryptotheology: a peculiar religion of deus absconditus who conceals himself and retreats in the background in order to let the world and the creation come stronger to the fore. Thus, if the “mystical rose” is to reach its full glory and achieve an autotelic existence causa sui or “without why,” which so far had only been God’s attribute, God the Creator must become a “hidden God,” i.e. conceal his blinding splendour. By playing on the Lurianic motif of tsimtsum, “God’s withdrawal,” and its avatars in the modern thought from Hegel to Derrida, I wish to outline a peculiar “religion of the World” – neither simply secular, nor traditionally theological – which I see as the unique modern contribution to the evolution of religious faith. In modernity, faith does not disappear: it only changes its object.

The Postsecular Romanticism – the Case of Shelley

The paper proposes to define the concept of postsecularity as some sort of interpretative tool to deal with historical phenomena related to the presence of religious ideas in modern literature. The subject of this postsecular hermeneutics is British Romanticism and in particular the work of Percy B. Shelley. It is the latter’s evolution from the attitude of materialistic atheism towards some appreciation of religious or spiritual dimension that the paper is focused on. This evolution leads Shelley – especially in Mont Blanc that I discuss here more closely – to a highly idiosyncratic and sceptical form of “negative theology.”

The Fourth Dimension. R.S. Thomas’s Poetry and the Question
of God’s Absence

The text deals with the poetry of R.S. Thomas (1913−2000) – a British author and an Anglican priest in the Church of Wales – whose works are full of controversial (given his priesthood) statements concerning the absence of God. As a lot of Thomas’s poems convey thoughts intersecting with post-secular reflection on the death of God, rooted in Derrida’s questioning of the “metaphysics of presence,” the article aims at tracing the inspirations behind Thomas’s quasi-religious poetry. The point of departure for this reflection is the poet’s recollection of being left by his parents alone for the first time. The impression of an empty house turns out to be an experience which shaped the poet’s attitude towards the disenchanted space he lives in. Although most critics claim that the apparent absence of God in Thomas’s poetry results directly from the tradition of theological via negativa, the author of the article pays attention to those characteristics which differentiate Thomas’s spirituality from the theological tradition and the most important difference between the poet’s attitude and the traditional model of Christian contemplation turns out to be time, or, more precisely, the temporal discrepancy between the possible accessibility of the transcendent being and the man’s ability to “catch it at work.”
 

Transformation is Not a Return. A Reading of a Poem by Witold Wirpsza (and of All Other Polish Postsecular Poems)

While challenging the common view which sees postsecularism as a return to religion, this paper is an attempt to apply the main tenets of the postsecular thought to the literary criticism accompanying the Polish literature. After a brief presentation of  several Polish poets whose works meet the proposed criteria of postsecularism (T. Karpowicz, K. Miłobędzka, S. Barańczak and W. Wirpsza), the author sets forth the argument that it is the linguistic aspect of the poems that lets us read them as postsecular. The main part of the paper is a critical reading of Witold Wirpsza’s 1971 poem “Powrót w zamęcie” (“A Return in Confusion”) which is interpreted as, on the one hand, an illustration of the idea of the society being forced into secularisation and, on the other hand, an effect of an intertextual play with Jan Kochanowski’s “Hymn.” Both aspects are crucial in identifying the postsecular rhetoric of the poem as they involve an unorthodox rendering of theological motifs and structures (making it possible to approach them from the perspectives of animal studies and animal theology), the idea of the artistic potential of blasphemy, and the proposition of the vital role of the “linguistic moment” (J. Hillis Miller) in the extra-linguistic interpretation of poetic texts.
 

The article is a review of Aleksandra Ubertowska’s book Holokaust. Auto(tanato)grafie which analyses the Holocaust literature, especially autobiographical narratives, introducing an opposition between “centre” and “periphery,” as well as the notion of “auto(tanato)graphy.” Ubertowska focuses on three genres: essay, literary representations of women’s war experience and autobiographies of the Holocaust historians, which she describes as “peripheral” and “controversial.” The main aim of the review is to present values and doubts about Ubertowska’s conception and to supplement it by the comitted issues and remarks about the current situation of the Holocaust literature.
 

The text is an extensive review of the book by Aleksandra Ubertowska  titled “The Holocaust. Auto (tanato) graphies.” It underlines, first of all, topics related to the diversity of possible representations of the Annihilation and the revision of the views of the researchers who approach fictionalisation of that event in an orthodox way. The author tries to approach critically Ubertowska’s concept as well as her outlook on representations of the Holocaust. She also looks at the terminology used in the book and seizing the opportunity she presents attitudes of other researchers dealing with this subject, which are very far different from each other sometimes. Therefore the text broaches such issues as: inexpressibility of the Holocaust, ethics of representation, postmemory, dual status of a historian and a participant.

The review provides a brief overview of the collective work edited by Eugenia Prokop--Janiec that is devoted to literary and cultural Polish-Jewish contacts in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, recognized in the context of the changes in the processes of modernisation and modernity.