A Poetics of Comparison: Euripides, Zhuangzi, and the Human Poise of Imaginative Construction

Abstract

As constructive acts of imaginative making, comparative endeavors in the study of religion bear descriptive, interpretive, and normative demands in ways that poetry and poetics can speak to especially well. By drawing upon poets to engage and elaborate extant theoretical concerns in comparative study, I present an approach for considering comparisons as made objects. As such, using poet Kay Ryan's terms, I suggest rafters and ghost ribs of various forms characterize the scholar's methodological structures, the religious texts at issue, and the ideals of practice emergent from each. A comparison of Euripides and Zhuangzi—focusing on their chorus-like discursive strategies and their respective ideals of spiritual endurance and spiritual anticipation—accompanies the essay's theoretical emphases as a preliminary example of what might be involved in a terrain for comparative religious ethics comprised via poetics.