Literature gets re-sacralized as a bastion of Western freedom during crises

Evidence

In Britain, the attempt to erect the literary as a main bastion of Western freedom is only the latest instance of a tendency that has appeared sporadically but especially at times of crisis over the past two hundred or so years. This tendency frequently occurs as a response to forms of social change felt to be threatening to bourgeois hegemony. … Talal Asad’s assertion that “religious toleration was a political means to a strong state power” after the seventeenth-century European wars of religion might confuse cause and effect; state power was the price to be paid for ensuring toleration and the advance of secularism rather than something already lurking in the shadows waiting for an appropriate vehicle. Yet Asad is correct to suggest that after Kant the insistence that religion should submit to criticism and reason became an Enlightenment commonplace. Rational criticism becomes an alternative to religious authority—something that resurfaces again, two hundred years later, in the Satanic Verses affair, where freedom to criticize Islam is exalted and where “the sacred role performed by literature in modern culture” accounts for the outrage caused when protestors in Bradford burned a copy of the book. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 86

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• DEFINE: Defines the historical mechanism by which literature gets talismanic potency in secularist debates.

Related

• Literature’s talismanic power in Islamophobia debates depends on its interpretive openness (similarity 0.84)
• Secular literary study acquired a religious aura as Europe’s moral essence (similarity 0.83)
• The bourgeois novel was co-opted to universalize Western secular ‘human nature’ (similarity 0.81)
• Literature functions as a technology sanctifying Western modernity against the Muslim Other (similarity 0.81)
• Secularization transferred religious aura to art and literature. (similarity 0.80)
• Secular universities preserved a religious aura around art as Europe’s moral essence (similarity 0.79)
• Western literary criticism’s perceived openness contrasts with a misread notion of a closed Quran. (similarity 0.78)
• Secular and sacred narrative traditions interpenetrate and never diverged (similarity 0.78)