Catchier Title: Catholic Postmodernism?

I suppose the whole "finishing a dissertation draft" thing is making me feel like an academic again or something, because my last few posts have been very much in the academic vein. That makes me feel good, really, because this is pretty much how I should be thinking if I want to pull-off an academic career of sorts. Also, it's nice to have ideas & feel excited about having ideas again!! So continuing the trend. . .

In response to my last post about Reading Modernism as an Adult, Maria, fellow-Catholic Academic and Modernist (!) wrote a post about her experiences of Modernism as an Adult, with particular reference to postmodernism. She writes:

I realized that I was a modernist after a few years too. Especially, in grad school when I realized that my dabbling in postmodernism had turned me off of over fragmentation without a purpose. A purpose of purposelessness. I found that increasingly annoying. Particularly because of the discussions that I had in the last few courses of my MA with people who thought that uselessness had more use than well, use (sorry about that). It really bothered me to think that there were people who thought in such a way.

This made a lot of sense to me. Particularly the bit about fellow students. I almost think sometimes that grad students and (to a lesser extent perhaps) professors who study postmodernism take it more seriously than the writers themselves.

I know that in theory postmodernism is "A purpose of purposelessness," and that many writers and philosophers do indeed take that to heart. But I would venture to say that not all of them do. In all of the fragmented contradictions of postmodernism, isn't it possible to sometimes glimpse a hint or hope of meaning? The pieces may not fit. . . or perhaps it's that we haven't yet found--or have forgotten--the clue to assembling them. Not that we would necessarily assemble them anyway, because aren't the pieces interesting in and of themselves? They make us laugh at ourselves. As in the stories of Donald Barthelme. But perhaps I'm not talking about the purist postmodernists. I have a few postmodernists that I keep up my sleeve and play with from time to time. I've waxed poetic about Calvino before. And Borges is always good for a laugh.

Now the interesting thing about Calvino and Borges is that--whether or not they ever set foot in a Catholic Church past the age of 7--both lived primarily or extensively in Catholic countries, or so it could be supposed. (I have since found Barthelme listed in many places under the heading "American Catholic writers," usually with the disclaimer that he declared himself to be agnostic.) And though being "culturally Catholic" isn't the same as being Catholic, raised Catholic, practicing Catholic, or coming from a Catholic background, it affects one. There are moments in Invisible Cities that remind me--not of Catholicism exactly, but of a certain worldview that I grew up with. It has to do with the continuation of life--indeed, the celebration of life!--in the face of fragmentation and apparent meaninglessness. I say "apparent" because nowhere in Calvino do I get the sense that life is absolutely meaningless. Life provides questions--seemingly contradictory questions--that we can't answer, but, well, we all know that. Of course, I'm also the person who sees Arthur C. Clarke's "The Star" as posing a dilemma that actually allows for a theological answer. *shrug* Truthfully, there's a certain kind of hopelessness that I find exhilarating. Perhaps because it is after a certain point of hopelessness that faith really begins to take root. There are moments like that in Tolkien, too, and they can be positively identified as Catholic in his context.

So what I'm wondering is, can a "Catholic postmodernism" be identified, and what would it gain for us to do so? Perhaps an articulation of a particular Catholic worldview. To return to my Catholic colleges question, I think I imagine an academic community that would assist and support this kind of inquiry--colleagues who would take such questions seriously. Wonder where I could find such a place?