"Threshold of Revelation": Don DeLillo, Tony Kushner, and an Epistemics of the Encounter. Issue 1 (1st January 2016)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Sierra, Erick
• Is Part Of: Critique. Volume 57:Issue 1(2016)
• Page Start: 16
• Page End: 28
• Publication Date: 2016-01-01
• Subjects: Postsecular literature -- epistemology -- ethics -- ontological participation; Fiction -- 20th century -- History and criticism -- Periodicals; Letterkunde; Engels; Electronic journals; 809.304
• DOI: 10.1080/00111619.2015.1019406
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0011-1619

Abstract

ABSTRACT: Postsecular criticism has celebrated non-dogmatic postmodern mysticism as mollifying the violence of religious fundamentalist certitudes. However, postmodern literature seems equally to suggest that too undefined a spirituality can itself serve as principle of violence. Don DeLillo's White Noise and Tony Kushner's Angels in America, in response, conceptualize a mode of cognition neither too fundamentalist/totalizing nor too mystical/subjective, situating knowledge instead in direct—ontological—participation in the suffering of the human Other.