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• Title: Psyche's "Whisp'ring Fan" and Keats's Genealogy of the Secular.
• Author : Studies in Romanticism
• Release Date : January 22, 2011
• Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
• Pages : * pages
• Size : 220 KB

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IN A PREFATORY LETTER TO GEORGE AND GEORGIANA, KEATS CLAIMS TO have written the Ode to Psyche because he is "more orthodox tha[n] to let a he[a]then Goddess be so neglected." (1) In its most apparent sense, this pose of Hellenic orthodoxy sounds typical of the "Cockney classicism" that has increasingly come to define one aspect of Keats's literary practice. Situating Keats in the "Cockney school" has helped to illuminate the worldly and oppositional character of poetry that previously seemed aestheticizing or escapist. In particular, Nicholas Roe and Jeffrey Cox have reemphasized the oppositional use to which Greek antiquity was often put. (2) By aligning himself with history's victims--specifically that "old religion" made obsolete during the Augustan age, but arguably also its modem counterparts--Keats positions himself against the geopolitical power he often refers to simply as "Christianity." (3) But criticizing Christianity may not be as radical or as simple a posture as is sometimes assumed. A number of scholars, most recently Charles Taylor in A Secular Age, have argued that Christianity and secularism have more in common than Cockney classicism would suggest. Challenging "subtraction stories" of secularization, in which the emergence of "secular" values like liberal pluralism and autonomous state institutions is characterized as a removal of religion, Taylor has argued that such values can be understood as developments of a specifically Christian logic. (4) On this argument, Keats's secularist program, which often seems to give him his subversive edge, may in fact be substantially continuous with what it claims to be critiquing. Moreover, recent critiques of secular politics, from scholars like Talal Asad, Gil Anidjar and others, pursue the more dramatic possibility that the "invention" of the distinction between secular and religious has served the interests of a state power bent on the management and coercion of its subjects. That distinction has been conditioned, they argue, by the governmental interests of colonial expansion, as well as the Orientalist scholarship that underwrote that expansion. Anidjar offers perhaps the most stringent version of this critique when he proposes that the secular is not just religion's continuation by other means, but that both "the religious and the secular are terms that ... have persisted historically, institutionally in masking ... the one pertinent religion,"--that is, Christianity. (5) To the extent that Keats's paganism remains caught up in a critique of religion, it is open to the challenge that secularism "is a name Christianity gave itself when it invented religion, when it named its other or others as religions." (6) Keats may call Hunt's Examiner a "Battering Ram against Christianity," but both Hunt's Religion of the Heart and Keats's Ode to Psyche would, on Anidjar's argument, be examples of Christianity carrying on in the form of "secularized religion." (7)

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