Can Postcritique Handle a “Heaven-sent” Text?: Quranic Enchantment in Mohja Kahf’s The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf and Ayad Akhtar’s American Dervish

Abstract

The postcritical turn in literary studies has a vexed relation to religion. Postcritique draws heavily from religious terms and concepts, and yet it shies away from dealing with religion as religion. As Rita Felski acknowledges, “We now know that secular interpretation – even in the guise of critique – has not stripped itself of its sacred residues and that reason cannot be purified of all traces of enchantment” (Limits 174). But lest her account of postcritique seem “dangerously close to the edges of secular thought” Felski reassures her secular-minded readers that literary “enchantments are magical without requiring the intervention of the supernatural” and therefore “art works are not heaven-sent” (Uses 57; Limits 75, 153). Similarly, James Simpson speaks of a “secular faith,” a way of reading in which we “experience at least some faint reverberation of divine frission” (379, 378). But he still draws a clear line between secular readers like him and religious people “who are confident in the existence of the heavens” (378). And Stephen Best, with reference to Paul Ricoeur, supports a “postcritical faith” that credits an experience of absorption in a text, but Best's use of religious terms serves discussions of secular reading, not religious experiences (341–42). For all their investment in religious language, these scholars retain a secular mind-set that Charles Taylor identifies as a “closed immanent frame” that involves, if not a complete “rejection of the transcendent,” at least a very circumspect bracketing of it (548). Postcritical scholars are still too critical of religion to lend it their characteristically sympathetic treatment. Thus, in spite of a number of implicit affinities, postcritique has left direct engagements with religion in literature up to postsecular studies. So far, religion is a source for postcritique, not its object. In other words, postcritique is not yet postsecular – and I want to show how it could be enriched by becoming so. Although postcritique seeks to turn away from ideological critiques that demystify literature, it is still beholden to secular critiques that demystify religion. So how can