Jack O'Briant

My dissertation investigates the prominence of religious themes and ideas in the contemporary U.S. migrant novel, considering the relationship between these novels’ varying approaches to the fraught concept of identity — the marketplace demands for representation, the conceptual problematics of collective categorization, the political efficacy of group solidarity — and their approaches to the equally nebulous concept of religion — its colonial history, its liberatory potential, and its promises of transcendence. In doing so, I attempt to show how debates surrounding the status of identity in literary studies at the end of the twentieth century share meaningful structural contours with foundational questions about the status of religion in the secular academy at the turn of the twentieth century. I proceed to argue that contemporary U.S. migrant writers, well-versed in academic identity discourses, have often used religion in their works to reveal and, at times, subvert the constraints imposed by conventional Western academic frameworks for understanding and debating identity.