We begin from the premise that the religious promise of heaven as the fulfillment of life and perfect love, persist on in modern society. These vestiges of paradise arguably become the driving force of a world organized by capitalism where human life must seek self-transcendence in the world. To understand this elusive and contradictory secular ideology, we will examine some major intellectual arguments that both advocated and critiqued it, including those by Locke, Marx, Freud, and Coetzee. But the main emphasis will be on American and British film as well as fiction by Johnson, Austen, Wilde, Fitzgerald, Roth, Tobin, and Whitehead among others.
English Department