Erickson, Gregory

Gregory Erickson is a literary scholar whose work examines the intersection of modernist literature and religious thought, particularly focusing on representations of divine absence in twentieth-century fiction. His book "The Absence of God in Modernist Literature" (2007) analyzes how modernist writers including Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, and Cormac McCarthy grapple with questions of faith, doubt, and the perceived withdrawal of the divine from contemporary experience. Erickson argues that modernist literature's engagement with God's absence paradoxically reveals a sustained theological concern, suggesting that the very articulation of divine absence constitutes a form of negative theology. His interdisciplinary approach bridges literary criticism and religious studies, demonstrating how modernist aesthetic innovations emerged partly from writers' attempts to represent spiritual crisis and the search for transcendence in an increasingly secular age.