Abstract

In the modern era, the waning of theological thought has not, as one might have expected, entailed the disappearance of the concept of evil. The following dissertation, "The Secularization of Evil: Readings in Modern Literature and Social Thought," analyzes the manner in which nineteenth- and twentieth-century literary and social discourses have built secular accounts of evil. Chapter One charts a progression in Baudelaire's poetics away from a Manichean vision of the universe in Les fleurs du mal toward the demystification of evil in the sociologically oriented poems of Le spleen de Paris. Chapter Two examines how the secularization of evil is intertwined with a modernist critique of subjectivity. It analyzes how naturalism, as part of the trend in late-nineteenth-century scientific and social thought that places increasing importance on environmental and hereditary factors in the study of human behavior, questions the theological notion of free will. By portraying the body as a source of violent drives, Zola transposes into literary form the secularization of Christian antagonism toward the body that was taking place in contemporary scientific discourse. Chapter Three situates Celine's novels within a reversal in early twentieth-century thought of the correlation between evil and the body, in which the body is recast as the victim of an exterior evil condition. While Celine too discounts the role of individual agency in the question of evil, he also introduces a new path for secular thought, away from the demarcation of an easily identifiable source of evil such as the human body, to the description of an elusive evil "condition" that becomes intertwined with the study of modernization, notably industrialization, mechanization, and urbanization. The final chapter examines how, in the post-Holocaust era, the secularization of evil involves a progression away from a "modernist" approach toward a "post-modern" perspective. It looks at how thinkers such as Hannah Arendt, Miguel Benasayag and Tzvetan Todorov consider human tragedies as products of multiple historical conditions, as well as of historically conditioned ways of thinking about these conditions