Events

It is often said that we must set aside skepticism in order to fully enter the world of a literary text. Indeed, this has been the dominant understanding of literature since the Romantic period; and not coincidentally, it was also in the early nineteenth century that Europeans began to conceptualize religion as a human discourse that required a certain suspension of disbelief. In both cases, the loss of literal referentiality led not to falsehood but to a greater referentiality. This paper discerns in some contemporary cultural forms a coming-apart of this consensus. Discussing both the music of Kendrick Lamar and certain contemporary novels known as “autofiction,” I will suggest that in the 2010s some of our most innovative writers began gesturing formally toward an unmediated relationship with the absolute. In this way they revived an earlier critique of Romanticism and anticipated by several years the crisis of trust that defines our current cultural moment.