William James, Mysticism and the Modernist Epiphany
Graham Jensen
Edinburgh University Press eBooks January 10, 2023 DOI: 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474494786.003.0016 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Theoretical or philosophical paper Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Topics | Mysticism |
| Key points | Argues that modernist literary epiphanies cannot be fully understood in secular terms because their language is largely indistinguishable from the mystical and conversion discourse found in William James's The Varieties of Religious Experience, indicating modernists' ongoing, sometimes unorthodox commitments to religious imaginaries rather than a thoroughgoing secularisation. Proposes that James's articulation of mystical experience was entangled with Wordsworth's poetry from the outset, and that Varieties in turn provided a popular model for modernist and later twentieth-century writers and critics. |
Abstract
This chapter contends that the language of religious experience is in many ways indistinguishable from the language of epiphanies so central to literary modernism. Against critics who regard the Romantic epiphany as a secular form of revelation, it posits that modernist epiphanies cannot be fully understood in secular terms; they remind us, instead, of modernism’s religious and Romantic inheritances—two of its many vestigial tails. Indeed, definitions of literary epiphanies supplied by critics and by modernist writers such as Conrad and Joyce are consistently framed using the kinds of mystical and conversion discourse reproduced in William James’s influential study of The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), even as they register modernism’s documented obsession with the quotidian or the mundane. These correspondences cumulatively highlight not a thoroughgoing project of secularisation, but modernists’ ongoing—albeit highly varied and sometimes unorthodox—commitments to religious imaginaries and ideals. Moreover, the chapter concludes by suggesting that: (1) James’s own articulation of mystical, ineffable experiences without necessary recourse to institutional religious frameworks was actually entangled with literature—specifically, the poetry of William Wordsworth—from the outset; and (2) Varieties, in turn, provided a popular model for modernist and other twentieth-century writers and critics.
Comparable studies
Other theoretical and historical papers on mysticism, most cited first.
| Study | Year | Design | Participants |
|---|---|---|---|
| The mystical mind: probing the biology of religious experience | 2000 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| Religious and Mystical Experiences as Artifacts of Temporal Lobe Function: A General Hypothesis | 1983 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| The Problem of Pure Consciousness: Mysticism and Philosophy | 1993 | Edited collection of essays | |
| Irreducible Mind: Toward a Psychology for the 21st Century | 2020 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| Mysticism and schizophrenia: A phenomenological exploration of the structure of consciousness in the schizophrenia spectrum disorders. | 2016 | Theoretical or philosophical paper |