SOURCE: “On Bridging Modern Literature and Religion,” in Renascence, Vol. XXVI, No. 1, Autumn, 1973, pp. 15-23.

In the following excerpt, Simonson discusses the distinctions between the literary and the religious experience in modern literature, suggesting that an effort to bridge the two may be impossible.

In the early 1960s the students at Columbia College demanded that a course in modern literature be introduced into the English curriculum. Acceding to this demand, the English Department reacted strongly: “Very well, if [students] want the modern, let them have it—let them have it, as Henry James says, full in the face. We shall give the course, but we shall give it on the highest level, and if they think, as students do, that the modern will naturally meet them in a genial way, let them have their gay and easy time with Yeats and Eliot, with Joyce and Proust and Kafka...