Dean of the College Presents
Faculty Seminar
Wednesday, April 5, 2017
Olin Humanities, Room 102
6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
"Modernism, Secularism, and the Problem of Evil"
by Professor Matthew Mutter
Since Voltaire’s poem on the devastating Lisbon earthquake of 1755, the insolubility of the classic “problem of evil” has often been thought of as an agent of secularization among modern intellectuals. But as Hannah Arendt noted, there is a secular problem embedded in the religious project of theodicy. Behind the desire to justify God, she wrote, lurked “the suspicion that life as we know it stands in great need of being justified.” In this presentation Professor Mutter will argue that major modernist writers began to articulate a distinctly secular problem of evil. A central imperative of modern secularism demands the affirmation of the immanent world over against religious appetites for transcendence, but this imperative is harassed in modernist literature by an anxiety that this world may not be “adequate” as either scene or object of human desire. This talk will thus attempt to trace the implications of Wallace Stevens’s question in “Esthétique du Mal”—“What place in which to be is not enough / To be?”—and to put that concern in conversation with meditations on evil and secularity in the writings of Virginia Woolf, W.B. Yeats, and W.H. Auden. by Professor Matthew Mutter
*Please join us for a reception prior to the event beginning at 6:00 p.m. in the Olin Atrium
For more information, call 845-758-7421, or e-mail [email protected].
Time: 6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Location: Olin Humanities, Room 102