Dismantling the Divine: D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett

Both Kant and the nineteenth-century idealistic philosophers whom he influenced proposed the artist as a replacement for Christ as revealer of truth. "Dismantling the Divine" explores the ways in which Lawrence, Joyce, and Beckett dismantle this model in some of their best novels by questioning the artist’s ability to respond to “subjective relativism”—a term I use to denote the modern phenomenon of existential uncertainty that results from the loss of religious conviction. The book views L...