Religion, Ethics and Literature

The Research Committee on Religion, Ethics and Literature investigates the philosophical and theoretical roles of religion and ethics in relation to literature, as well as explores the fraught relationship between secularism and post-secularism. It examines global literary phenomena as instances of subject formation in order to rethink new relationships between these three disciplines. We are particularly concerned with the modern displacement of religion, and modernity’s epistemological underpinnings as these aspects reflect judgments about the world, culture, and its relationship to a religious past. While the examination of religious imagery, symbolism and the role of myth will not be the purview of this committee, the signifiers of religion in as much as they motivate “an ethical turn” in the text is a key element of the committee’s purview.

As a result, the committee has a wide-ranging concern with literature’s interstitial spaces, those places that reimagine the boundaries of religion, ethics, and literature, as fluid conditions. In other words, we question the epistemologies and categories that underwrite the ways that religion, and ethics coalesce around aesthetic experience and literary object. Moreover, the committee examines literature’s unique ontology in relation to religion and ethics to ponder how these epistemic structures can be transformed by it.

Interested individuals can participate in all the committee’s events without joining it, but they are welcome to join.

To join the committee, ICLA members should send a short biographical paragraph to the Chair, noting academic position, rank, and institution, and request specifically to join the committee.

Our membership is global and particularly active in Europe, the United States, and Israel. The international tenor of our committee speaks to several issues confronting comparatists globally. The committee recruits heavily among comparatists without national organizations in their countries. Likewise, we also invite comparatists who are institutionally based in departments other than of Comparative Literature. 

Graduate students and contingent faculty remain a large constituency within this committee.

Graduate student and early career members are welcome to join the committee and the committee reserves 2 of the 4 officer positions for such members.