Cooper Harriss presented an in-progress work titled “Weird Canonical Historical Archive Blues: The Prospect of Religious Historical Fiction” at a faculty colloquium. This essay considers prospects of religious historical fiction through readings in recent novels by James McBride and Karl Ove Knausgaard—works whose historical-fictional dynamics (here understood as “the weird” and “the blues”) negotiate sacred and profane expressions that distinguish this religious historical fiction from its more common, and more limited, pairings. In the process it ironizes prevalent assumptions about reality, epistemology, canonicity, and ethics.
The College of Arts