Postgraduate students

Eric Repphun BS MA PhD

Haunted: Religious Modernity and Reenchantment

The academic study of religion has for too long laboured under a flawed understanding of the relationship between modernity and religion. Any narrative of the simple displacement of religion by a universal and secularising modernity fails to recognise the complexity of history. This thesis seeks to answer a fundamental question: what does it mean for the study of religion if we accept that modernity, in certain circumstances, can generate the religious? New conceptual tools are needed to deal critically with the consequences of embracing the true density of modernity. The study of religion can be greatly enhanced by one such concept: reenchantment. However, reenchantment, as an interpretive framework, must be carefully formulated. Reenchantment cannot be properly understood as a reversal of disenchantment but as an ongoing dialectic of reenchantment and rationalisation. The formulation of a credible and useful concept of reenchantment can in turn be aided by the work of the philosopher and cultural critic Jean Baudrillard, which demonstrates a remarkable congruence with the concept of reenchantment as we are presenting it here. The thesis is divided into two sections. The first, substantially longer, section presents in some detail thick reenchantment as an interpretive frame. The second section offers detailed readings of the work of three contemporary authors – novelists Douglas Coupland and Chuck Palahniuk and filmmaker Tom Tykwer – as instantiations of the sorts of cultural artefacts that the conceptual framework of thick reenchantment means to explore.

Supervisor: Professor Ivor Davidson