Gender and Verse: Religion in New Zealand Women's Poetry, 1970-2019

<p>This thesis explores the remarkable, surprising and enduring presence of religion within the writings of New Zealand women poets since the 1970s. Analysing a comprehensive range of poems, I argue that religion is a dynamic and compelling feature of women’s poetry, emerging in a number of distinctive forms and tones. Using a thematic analysis, I explore religion in relation to domesticities, body and flesh, and whenua/land. I show that women poets deploy and rework religious ideas in ways that illuminate their gendered perspectives and experiences. Arguing that religion should be brought back into the centre of the scholarly analysis of New Zealand literature, I advance a fresh approach to the concept of religion. This framework acknowledges the interdependence and mutual imbrication of ‘religion’ and the ‘secular’, and also facilitates attention to ‘spirituality’. This expansive framework affords careful investigation into the interrelationships between all three of these modern categories. Having shown that religion permeates New Zealand women’s poetry and that attending to religion’s presence is vital for interpretation, I argue for a bona fide cross- disciplinary conversation between religious studies and literary studies; a revitalised investigation on ‘religion and literature’ will be productive for both fields.</p>

Gender and Verse: Religion in New Zealand Women's Poetry, 1970-2019

<p>This thesis explores the remarkable, surprising and enduring presence of religion within the writings of New Zealand women poets since the 1970s. Analysing a comprehensive range of poems, I argue that religion is a dynamic and compelling feature of women’s poetry, emerging in a number of distinctive forms and tones. Using a thematic analysis, I explore religion in relation to domesticities, body and flesh, and whenua/land. I show that women poets deploy and rework religious ideas in ways that illuminate their gendered perspectives and experiences. Arguing that religion should be brought back into the centre of the scholarly analysis of New Zealand literature, I advance a fresh approach to the concept of religion. This framework acknowledges the interdependence and mutual imbrication of ‘religion’ and the ‘secular’, and also facilitates attention to ‘spirituality’. This expansive framework affords careful investigation into the interrelationships between all three of these modern categories. Having shown that religion permeates New Zealand women’s poetry and that attending to religion’s presence is vital for interpretation, I argue for a bona fide cross- disciplinary conversation between religious studies and literary studies; a revitalised investigation on ‘religion and literature’ will be productive for both fields.</p>

Death Cults and Dystopian Scenarios: Neo-Nazi Religion and Literature in the USA Today

In this article, I investigate the literary representation of the religious convictions and political strategy of neo-Nazi ideologues who are influential in rightwing authoritarian movements in the USA today. The reason that I do this is because in contemporary fascism, the novel has replaced the political manifesto, the military manual and proselytizing testimony, since fiction can evade censorship and avoid prosecution. I read William Luther Pierce’s Turner Diaries and Hunter together with his text on speculative metaphysics and religious belief, Cosmotheism. Then, I turn to Harold Covington’s Northwestern Quintet with The Brigade, reading this with Christian Identity and his own conception of Nazi religious tolerance. Finally, I look at OT Gunnarsson’s Hear the Cradle Song, reading this together with discussions of racism in Californian Odinism. I propose that what this literature shows is that the doctrinal differences between the three main strands of neo-Nazi religion—Cosmotheism, Christian Identity and Odinism—are less significant than their common ideological functions. These are twofold: (1) the sacralization of violence and (2) the sanctification of elites. The dystopian fictions of fascist literature present civil war scenarios whose white nationalist and genocidal outcome is the result of what are, strictly speaking, supremacist death cults.

Conclusion

The Conclusion recapitulates the book’s main arguments, as well as the main ideas of each thinker treated. It takes a step back to explore the relationship between these thinkers’ ideas and the broader inter-religious climate of Kashmir in these centuries, and then draws out some of the major implications that these ideas may hold for how we understand these thinkers and the intellectual culture of Kashmir in this period. The Conclusion also returns to the theoretical issues raised in the Introduction, discussing the role that the theory of “religion-as-vortex” might play in future research on South Asian religion—and literature more broadly—and suggesting some possible avenues for future work.

Speculations

This chapter addresses the vexed relationship between deconstruction and science. ‘Speculation’ is a term common both to Derrida’s early reading of Hegelian speculative philosophy and to his extensive reflection on psychoanalysis in texts such as La Carte postale (The Post Card). In its account of Freud’s singular synthesis of concrete observation and fictive speculation in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, La Carte postale provides an unexpectedly rich interrogation of the logic of scientific discovery, one at odds with recent caricatures of Derrida’s thought by proponents of a ‘speculative’ materialism. Freud’s speculations on the pleasure principle allow Derrida to explore psychoanalysis’s status as a ‘positive’ science, its relationship to technology (or technoscience), as well as the limits of psychoanalysis’s own self-delimitation vis-à-vis its various others: metaphysics, religion, and literature or fiction. Positive science’s structural dependency on ‘speculative fictions’ has implications for our understanding of both science and fiction, but it also has implications for recent calls by neuropsychoanalysts to do away with the speculative dimensions of psychoanalytic inquiry.

Nilai-Nilai Akhlak dalam Novel Guru Aini Karya Andrea Hirata

Moral Values in Guru Aini Written by Andrea Hirata ABSTRAKPenelitian ini berisi tentang nilai-nilai Akhlak Al-Islam dan Kemuhammadiyahan dalam novel Guru Aini karya Andrea Hirata. Nilai akhlak menjadi fokus utama pada penelitian ini karena akhlak merupakan salah satu pondasi dasar dari sifat manusia yang sangat erat kaitannya dengan perilaku manusia dengan Tuhannya. Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk memperoleh pemahaman yang mendalam mengenai nilai-nilai akhlak berupa nilai takwa, tawakal, kejujuran, keikhlasan, sabar dan syukur dari novel Guru Aini karya Andrea Hirata. Novel tersebut memiliki nilai akhlak yang perlu diterapkan dalam kehidupan bermasyarakat serta menjadi khazanah keilmuan berkaitan antara agama dan sastra. Penelitian ini menggunakan metode kualitatif dan pendekatan analisis isi. Metode kualitatif ini dapat menghasilkan data deskriptif berupa kata-kata tertulis atau atau isi komunikasi berupa percakapan, teks tertulis, dan fotografi. Simpulan dari hasil penelitian ini terdapat 6 kutipan dari nilai takwal, 14 kutipan nilai tawakal, 18 kutipan dari nilai kejujuran, 4 kutipan dari nilai keikhlasan, 1 kutipan dari nilai sabar, dan 14 kutipan dari nilai syukur. Kata kunci: Nilai-nilai akhlak, karya sastra, novelABSTRACTThis study contains moral values based on Al-Islam and Muhammadiyah in the novel Guru Aini by Andrea Hirata. The value of akhlak (moral) is the main focus of this research because it is one of the basic foundations of human nature which is very closely related to human behavior with God. This study aims to gain deep understanding of akhlak (moral) values in the form value of piety/morals, resignation/never giving up, honesty, sincerity, patience and gratitude from the novel Guru Aini by Andrea Hirata. The novel has a moral value that needs to be applied in social life and becomes a scientific treasure related to religion and literature. This research uses qualitative method and content analysis approach, this qualitative method can produce descriptive data in the form of written words or communication content in the form of conversation, written text, and photography. Conclusions from the results of this study there are 6 quotes from the value of piety/morals, 14 quotes from the value of resignation / never give up, 18 quotes from the value of honesty, 4 quotations from the value of sincerity, 1 quote from the value of patience, and 14 quotes from the value of gratitude.Keywords: Akhlak (moral) value, literature, novelThis study contains moral values based on Al-Islam and Muhammadiyah in the novel Guru Aini by Andrea Hirata. The value of akhlak (moral) is the main focus of this research because it is one of the basic foundations of human nature which is very closely related to human behavior with God. This study aims to gain deep understanding of akhlak (moral) values in the form value of piety/morals, resignation/never giving up, honesty, sincerity, patience and gratitude from the novel Guru Aini by Andrea Hirata. The novel has a moral value that needs to be applied in social life and becomes a scientific treasure related to religion and literature. This research uses qualitative method and content analysis approach, this qualitative method can produce descriptive data in the form of written words or communication content in the form of conversation, written text, and photography. Conclusions from the results of this study there are 6 quotes from the value of piety/morals, 14 quotes from the value of resignation / never give up, 18 quotes from the value of honesty, 4 quotations from the value of sincerity, 1 quote from the value of patience, and 14 quotes from the value of gratitude.

Religion and Literature, Identity and Individual: Resetting the Muslim-Christian Encounter

In the first two decades of the twenty-first century inter-faith encounters have become a casualty of a paradigm shift in the thinking about the global order from the political-ideological bi-polar worldview of the Cold War era to a multipolar world marred by the prospect of culture wars along civilisational fault lines shaped by religiously-informed identity politics. On the back of 9/11 and other atrocities perpetrated by violent extremists from Muslim backgrounds, in particular relations with Muslims and the Islamic world are coined in binary terms of us-versus-them. Drawing on earlier research on cosmopolitanism, cultural hybridity and liminality, this article examines counter narratives to such modes of dichotomous thinking. It also seeks to shift away from the abstractions of collective religious identity formations to an appreciation of individual interpretations of religion. For that purpose, the article interrogates the notions of cultural schizophrenia, double genealogy and west-eastern affinities developed by philosophers and creative writers, such as Daryush Shayegan, Abdelwahab Meddeb, and Navid Kermani.