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Graham Greene: Catholic Literary Modernist
Rev. Dr. Mark Bosco, S. J.
Loyola University Chicago
It is something of a cliché that the so-called modern age witnessed the death of God, religion, or both. Modernist writers, among those most aware of their own “modernity,” have done much eulogizing of faith. The success of this Modernist “project” is, of course, complicated by the persistence of religion. Moreover, the modern period produced writers the likes of T.S. Eliot, Evelyn Waugh, and Graham Greene, to name only a few. I would like to suggest ways in which we can understand Greene as a representative “Catholic Modernist” who re-imagines Catholicism through modernist aesthetics, modernist sensibilities. In particular, I would like to develop the historical trajectory of this Catholic literary revival as a kind of Catholic literary modernism, and see in Greene's work, especially, how this is embodied.
Mark Bosco, S.J., holds a joint appointment as associate professor in English and Theology at Loyola University Chicago, and serves as its director of the Catholic Studies Program. His scholarship focuses on the intersection of Catholic theology, aesthetics, and literature. His book publications include Graham Greene's Catholic Imagination (Oxford UP 2005), and two edited volumes, Academic Novels as Satire: Critical Studies of an Emerging Genre (Edwin Mellen, 2007) and Finding God in All Things: Celebrating Bernard Lonergan, John Courtney Murray, and Karl Rahner (Fordham UP, 2007). He has published in such journals as The Southern Review, The Flannery O'Connor Review, and LOGOS: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture.
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