This research approaches new intersections between literature and religion from different points of view. The awareness that religion, taken in its widest meaning, has regained a central role in contemporary society and in academic courses inspired the choice of the subject. The renewed interest that literary studies have taken in religion lately, and the attention that theologians have been paying to literature emphasize the need for a deeper analysis of the relationship between the two disciplines. The Western Judaic-Christian tradition and Anglo-American literature have been the privileged field of analysis of this kind of research for the past decades. Yet the modern world has built its cultural identity also on the awareness of religious pluralism. Following the expansion of Western Empires, the universal, the universalization of Christianity has fostered the need for an increasingly pluralistic approach to world religions.
Literature offers a privileged field where these issues can be discussed and developed, thanks to the syncretic and ethical vocation that characterizes literary discourse. Being rooted in imagination and in the unquenchable yearning for the definition of horizons of meaning, as regards form literature and religion share a symbolic and narrative tendency, and both engage with the existential horizons of expectation, fear and hope that are based on an idea of faith as practice of belief, or as ¿voluntary suspension of disbelief¿ (Coleridge) when man confronts what does not fall within the sphere of the immediate and ordinary experience. There stems from this the paradoxical idea according to which literature never completely got rid of the original theological and mythical core, despite the secularization which has been taking place ever since and has left its mark on literary works.
The study of literature and religion is not merely a comfortable academic pursuit, but it matters in our society instead. The lively debate that has been going on ever since the last century, as witnessed by the number of books, journals and conferences devoted to the relationship between literature and religion, shows that this is indeed a topical subject offering opportunities for further initiatives and research. There emerges a sense of uneasiness when we look at the relationship between literature and religion or literature and theology, an impression that this is still tolerated but not quite free of resentment and suspicion. It is important therefore ¿ and this is part of the overall aim of this project ¿ to refocus what at times appears to be a reluctant twining in order to define the path toward a positive relationship between the two disciplines.
Religion and religious studies are not an exclusive subject of closet theologians and viceversa literature can be a fruitful and remarkable field of investigation for theologians and religious studies scholars, therefore work has to be done to open up this space in order to define a path towards an active engagement that focuses on new ways of further exploring the interrelations between literature and religion also outside the Anglo-American context.
Until now the debate in the field of Literature and Religion has been carried out mostly in the Anglo-Aamerican environment, as the works mentioned above suggest, and interesting studies have appeared in Germany. Here the theologians opened the path towards literature, as the seminal works by von Balthasar, Karl Barth, Paul Tillich and Karl-Joseph Kuschel demonstrate, while in the English-speaking world literary scholars were the first to take an interest in religion and theology and to explore the possible definition of a common ground for a shared discourse. Compared to what has been done both in the field of literature and religion as well as of literature and theology in the English speaking world and in Germany in the past 30 years, little has been done in Italy, except for the studies by Piero Boitani (The Bible and its Re-Writings and The Gospel according to Shakespeare), Antonio Spadaro, Pietro Gibellini (La Bibbia nella letteratura italiana, 5 voll.)), Vincenzo Arnone (Bibbia e letteratura, 2015), A. Bacianini (La Bibbia. Testo di Fede e modello letterario, 2015) and Sonia Gentili (Novecento Scritturale. La letteratura italiana e la Bibbia, 2016), and in France. Part of the research therefore will be devoted at exploring the potential for a rigorous and fruitful engagement between literature and religion in those areas where the debate is not as deeply rooted as it is in the Angloamerican world as well as to religions other than Christianity from the perspectives of world literature and world religion. The scope of the discussion can be opened up to address the issue of what to do with religious nationalism and fundamentalism, particularly extreme ideological uses of religious narrative and discourses, especially when we consider the challenges we have to confront nowadays in our multicultural and multi-ethnic society. From this point of view, one of the milestones of the research will be to examine the importance of poetry and religion for personal social identity, social cohesion and the relations between faiths and cultures.
Just like that of religious belief, the language of ¿poetic belief¿ is characterised by a strong supra-personal dimension and by its being irreducible to the laws and the agency of the individual. Literature always implies emotional commitment and a view for the future that engage with the existential and ethical dimensions of people. Following the extraordinary interest in emotions in most of the scientific sectors (including humanities) in the last few years, after the re-evaluation of the emotional component in the field of neuroscience (in this regard J. Ledoux, The Emotional Brain, Simon&Schuster, 1996 is one of the milestones), the members of the research group will also study the vocabulary and the semantics of emotions in the field of literature and religion.