Age of Miracles: Religion and Screen Media in Postwar American Fiction

Abstract

This dissertation examines how four postwar American writers, whose lives and fiction reveal a serious and sustained interest in religion and religious belief, treat screen media in their work. More specifically, it argues that Flannery O'Connor, Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace, and Don DeLillo constitute a group of writers who espouse various forms of Catholic or crypto-Catholic belief. By allowing these writers to take seriously certain pre-modern ideas about metaphysical reality--namely, the possible existence of an immaterial, supernatural realm that transcends the physical, sensible world--these belief systems may have made them more attuned to the seemingly immaterial and supernatural properties of screen media.