ABSTRACT

Representations of religious conversion are not very common in twenty-first-century Anglophone life writing, and those that exist are no longer limited to transitions between the world’s major faiths. One of the few autobiographical texts featuring New Religious Movement conversions is Will Hodgkinson’s The House is Full of Yogis. The Story of a Childhood Turned Upside Down (2014). Despite preserving the major components of a traditional conversion narrative, The House features some departures from the convention which ultimately turn it into an anti-conversion narrative. Among the most important is the fact that the results of the conversion as experienced by the convert’s family seem far from satisfactory. It is only in his adulthood that the memoirist endorses his father’s spiritual choices; as the memoir’s adolescent ‘narrated I’, he is less keen to do so. Consequently, in contrast to the didactic purposes of conventional conversion narratives, The House fails to offer an unambiguous moral lesson. In generic terms, The House is a hybrid of a growing-up memoir and a Bildungsroman, which can be read as a reflection of British society’s transition from the secular into its post-secular phase. This aspect of the novel seems to have escaped critical attention so far.

摘要

宗教conversion依的代表在二十一世纪的英语生活写作中不是很普遍，存在的代表不再局限于世界主要信仰之间的过渡。威尔·霍奇金森（Will Hodgkinson）的《独居者》（The House is Full of Yogis）是为数不多的以新宗教运动为题材的自传体文本之一。《童年的故事颠倒了》（2014年）。尽管保留传统的转换叙事的主要成分众议院具有一些与公约的背离，最终将其转变为反转换的叙述。其中最重要的事实是，the依者的家庭所经历的the依结果似乎远远不能令人满意。回忆家只有在成年后才认可父亲的精神选择。正如回忆录的青春期“叙述我”一样，他不太愿意这样做。因此，与传统conversion依叙事的教学目的相反，众议院未能提供明确的道德课程。一般而言，The House是一部成长回忆录和Bildungsroman的混合体可以理解为是英国社会从世俗过渡到世俗后阶段的反映。到目前为止，小说的这一方面似乎没有引起人们的重视。