Secularization transferred religious aura to art and literature.
Evidence
The Romantic view of art as autonomous, existing in and for itself, meant that it was ideally positioned to replace God as the transcendent repository of value. The secularization of the university in the nineteenth century ironically furthered the religious aura accumulating around art and literature, while the humanities took shape as a discipline emerging from philology and moral science. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 92
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
- XREF: Connects to the reader’s task: the novel inherits pseudosacred status, shaping how Muslim-inflected fiction is read.
Related
- Secular literary study acquired a religious aura as Europe’s moral essence (similarity 0.93)
- Secular universities preserved a religious aura around art as Europe’s moral essence (similarity 0.92)
- The secularization thesis fails to account for literature like Minaret (similarity 0.82)
- Secular and sacred narrative traditions interpenetrate and never diverged (similarity 0.82)
- The secularization thesis fails to account for religious difference in fiction (similarity 0.81)
- Modern classification of cultures secularized earlier religious structures (similarity 0.80)
- The bourgeois novel was co-opted to universalize Western secular ‘human nature’ (similarity 0.80)
- Literature gets re-sacralized as a bastion of Western freedom during crises (similarity 0.80)
- Literature functions as a technology sanctifying Western modernity against the Muslim Other (similarity 0.80)
- As secularization progresses, the novel’s subjective heroes become arbitrary grotesques (similarity 0.79)
- Secularism collapsed the medieval Christian cosmos into an ontological duality (similarity 0.79)