"The Profane Preacher and the Modern American Novel,"a Lecture by Steve Pinkerton

Throughout the twentieth century, American novelists of high literary ambition turned again and again to an elastic yet readily identifiable character type: the profane preacher. A man or woman of God who “formulates the sacred in profane terms” (per Ralph Ellison), this figure has proven pivotal for US novelists’ efforts to convey and critique core aspects of the American story. Typically solitary, itinerant, and often suffused with violent potential—a species or revision of “the rugged individualist,” and of what R. W. B. Lewis called “the American Adam”— profane preachers nonetheless stand at the intersection of unum and pluribus. Their full significance emerges only in relation to a community, often peripheral or precarious, that they help to forge and sustain—or to tear apart.

At the same time, this trope has enabled American writers to interrogate the varied forms of homegrown religiosity that Harold Bloom, following religious historian Sydney Ahlstrom, called the American Religion: an ostensibly Protestant but, for Bloom, actually post-Christian faith that “overdetermines much of our national life.” What aesthetic and ideological work do these profane preachers perform? How might their study illumine the aims, techniques, and achievements of the modern American novel? Of American culture more broadly? This talk will try to answer some of these questions, with reference not just to works by Ellison, William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, and Cormac McCarthy, but also to resonant examples from twentieth-century film, music, and real life.

Steve Pinkerton specializes in 20th-century literature and culture. His publications include Blasphemous Modernism (Oxford, 2017), as well as essays in Genre, Modernism/Modernity, Studies in the Novel, the Journal of Modern Literature, the African American Review, and The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism, Myth and Religion. This colloquium talk is culled from his current book project.

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