Churchgoing in the Modern Novel

Abstract

In works by James, Proust, Joyce, Kafka, and Woolf, lone wanderers, often with touristic inclinations, visit churches and puzzle over the question of what sort of power these "tombs and sepulchers of God" (Nietzsche) contain in an era when public rituals no longer command universal assent. The churchgoing scene plays such an important role in the modern novel, I argue, because it stages the encounter between the great public monuments of Christian faith and the intimate monuments of an increasingly privatized form of religious experience, modern novels. I challenge the "secularization hypothesis" that has dominated studies of the modern novel and discuss the origins of this hypothesis in the social sciences of the modernist period.

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