Following in the Footsteps of a God: The Transformative Power of Dionysus in Philostratus' Life of Apollonius of Tyana

In its response to traumatic forms of oppression associated with race, gender, and sexuality, the literature of Langston Hughes, H.D., Djuna Barnes, and Zora Neale Hurston-the writers of this study-illuminates how survival narratives are dynamically linked to the present moment. Their work places emphasis upon readerly experience through a set of aesthetic strategies that compel readers to inhabit the present. Take, for instance, Hughes's appeal to jazz music in his poetry; he uses improvisational language and call-and-response techniques that prompt a reader's attention and response to the complex scenes of racial trauma at play in his poems. Just as a jazz musician is asked to improvise or invent in the moment of play, Hughes's reader is called upon as a creative witness whose own enlivened reading grants his poetry survival. Through critical reading of Hughes and the other writers of this study, I offer new ways of thinking about the temporal quality of readerly experience and its transformative power to bear witness to survival. If as traditional critiques of modernism suggest, "time" is war-weary and ruptured in high-modernist classics such as James Joyce's Ulysses and Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, then in the literature of the periphery, broken time is reimagined as a source for creativity and transformation. By identifying the importance of alternative temporal imaginaries for marginalized populations, this dissertation contributes to new studies of time such as Elizabeth Freeman and José Muñoz's work on queer time, Alondra Nelson's study of "Afrofuturism," and Dana Luciano's work on sacred time. Furthermore, this project offers a critical intervention into trauma studies vis à vis the work of Cathy Caruth by arguing that the belated and repetitious impact of trauma is an imperative of survival aligned with present moment time. When we are present in our reading of stories about trauma, we participate as active witnesses to their survival; we partake-as the title of my study announces-in the "invention of survival" by transforming words on a page into living testimony.

The lives of others won most of top European and international film prizes between 2006 and 2007, including seven Lolas and an Oscar, but it has also been heavily attacked by some critics both for its sympathetic portrait of a Stasi officer and for its misogynistic portrait of a faithless, drug-addicted actress (e.g., Porton; Foundas). The monstrous Gerd Wiesler, critics have argued, is magically transformed into the Good of Georg Dreyman's novel after his sudden exposure to theater, poetry, and music, and vulnerable Christa-Maria Sieland (Mar- tina Gedeck) must be sacrificed to film's central love story, that between Wiesler (Ulrich Muhe) and Dreyman (Sebastian Koch). In my view, much of this negative criticism implicitly acknowledges that Lives is tremendously suc- cessful at authentically recreating East Ber- lin of 1980s. The film captures bleak- ness of architecture, cuisine, and fashion in such unnerving detail that reviews insistently demand that film deliver docu- mentary accuracy. too responded to film's authenticity and found its recreation of East Berlin had visited in 1983 uncanny and unset- tling. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck took pains to film on location in rare streets that had not been transformed after fall of Berlin Wall. He refined palette of film to capture sense of color in German Demo- cratic Republic (GDR), so that greens stand in for blues and orange-browns replace reds (von Donnersmarck, Interview on DVD). Visually, film strives for quality of documentary.But The Lives of Others is not a documentary. Although he researched his subject thoroughly for four years, von Donnersmarck's understand- ing of character, his interest in relationships, and his belief in transformative power of art do not come from history, but from an educa- tion in classic Western cinema. We do not fault Casablanca (1942) or Rome, Open City (1945) for being sentimental. We do not blame The Red Shoes (1948) or The Third Man (1949) for being overblown. Instead, we celebrate these films for courage of their sentimentality and hyperbole. And von Donnersmarck's first film is an homage to his cinematic heritage. The per- formance of Martina Gedeck cannot be divorced from iconic performances of Ingrid Berg- man, Alida Valli, Anna Magnani, Moira Shearer, and Julie Christie on which hers is based. And an awareness of Wiesler's cinematic anteced- ents complicates any simple reading of him as a good man.These antecedents have been largely over- shadowed by ideological critiques of Lives. Anna Funder, author of Stasiland, an ex- traordinary book about life in GDR, fears that Lives is fostering a new form of Ostalgie.Groups of ex-Stasi are becoming increasingly belligerent. They write articles and books, and conduct lawsuits against people who speak out against them, including against German publisher of Stasiland. . . . The system demanded such loyalty . . . that most ex-Stasi are still true believers. A story such as Wiesler's plays into their hands as they fight for their reputation. (Funder, Tyranny of Terror)Funder admires Lives: I think film deserves its public and critical acclaim. It is a superb film, a thing of beauty. But it could not have taken place (and never did) under GDR dic- tatorship. . . . No Stasi man ever tried to save his victims, because it was impossible. We'd know if one had, because files are so com- prehensive (Tyranny).Whereas Funder argues that von Donners- marck is taking brutal fact and turning it into narrative, argue exactly oppo- site. Von Donnersmarck's particular achieve- ment is using his cinematic influences-almost all of which are fantasy narratives-and trans- forming these into a film that many critics have misread as an attempt at documentary real- ity. Yet an intertextual reading that accounts for these fantasy narratives can do much to shatter this misperception. …

Reviewed by: Reading Sensations in Early Modern England Mary Floyd-Wilson Katharine A. Craik . Reading Sensations in Early Modern England. Early Modern Literature in History. Hampshire, U.K.: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007. xi + 200 pp. $69.95 (ISBN-10: 1-4039-2192-X, ISBN-13: 978-1-4039-2192-5). Katharine A. Craik's Reading Sensations in Early Modern England contributes to a subfield of literary studies that aims to recover early modern emotional experiences by drawing on contemporary understandings of the psychophysical humoral subject, thus sharing the interests of Michael Schoenfeldt1 and Gail Kern Paster.2 Craik, however, shifts the discussion in a new direction by drawing attention to the relationship "between the word and the flesh—and, more specifically, the relationship between literary texts and the bodies of English gentlemen" (p. 3), tracing how George Puttenham, Sir Philip Sidney, John Donne, Thomas Coryat, Richard Braithwait, and Thomas Cranley emphasized and valued the somatic effects of reading. Thoughtful and concise, Reading Sensations makes the compelling argument that reading was an active and often dangerous experience that "shaped, and sometimes imperiled, masculine subjectivity" (p. 3). In the first chapter, Craik puts Thomas Wright's The Passions of the Minde in Generall (1601, 1604), a guide to emotional self-mastery founded on medical knowledge and moral philosophy, next to Henry Crosse's Vertues Common-wealth: Or The High-way to Honour (1603), a moral treatise on the vices that plagued English gentlemen of the age. This textual pairing, Craik argues, brings to light a paradox "at the centre of many polemics . . . : how can poetry be both trifling and insignificant and, at the same time, devastating to those who consumed it?" (p. 26). The [End Page 936] risks lie in the dynamic and reciprocal exchange between "contagious books and the pliable minds, bodies and souls of those who consume them" (p. 26). Craik's observation that "poetry and the sacred word" appear to work on the passions and the body "in remarkably similar ways" (p. 33) is provocative but underdeveloped. It opens the door for others to consider further how the Reformation's emphasis on personal reading of the scripture may have influenced moral perspectives on the reader's somatic experience. In chapters 2 and 3, Craik focuses on George Puttenham and Sir Philip Sidney to consider how the "physical sensations triggered by imaginative writing which so worried Wright and Crosse became a creative resource" (p. 34) for those invested in the "transformative power of literature" (p. 35). In one of the book's strongest arguments, Craik maintains that Puttenham's The Arte of English Poesie (1589) develops a "new aesthetic vocabulary" to establish a productive link between poetry's stirring effects and a masculine English identity. Most surprising, as Craik notes, is Puttenham's insistence that the parts of poetry "not only move or arouse the sensitive bodies of readers, but are also themselves characterized by changeable bodily attributes such as heat, colour, size and texture" (p. 39). In her discussion of An Apology for Poetry (1595), Craik stresses Sidney's interest in the power of poetry to incite choler in soldiers serving their country. While noting that prominent male readers of The Arcadia such as Gabriel Harvey described the text's potential to inspire "noble courage," Craik suggests that Sidney actually "forbids readers" from taking pleasure in its representations of anger, acknowledging instead poetry's tendency to beguile (p. 71). In "'These Spots are but the Letters': John Donne and the Medicaments of Elegy," Craik reads a progression in Donne's faith in expressing, and thereby easing, sorrow. Whereas The Anniversaries fail as texts "designed to work therapeutically on despair," the confessional language in Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions not only "registers in its very structure and syntax the stages of Donne's sickness" (p. 91) but also "betokens God's grace" (p. 92). Overly neat and compressed, this chapter sees an evolution in Donne's beliefs that could be explained by emphasizing the generic differences between an elegy for a stranger and one's personal prayers in a time of crisis. Following an entertaining chapter on Thomas Coryat's literalizing the "rich vocabulary of bibliophagia" (p. 95), Craik tackles the...

EDITOR’S NOTE

Reviewed by: Experiments in Buddhist-Christian Encounter: From Buddha-Nature to the Divine Nature by Peter Feldmeier Duane R. Bidwell (bio) Experiments in Buddhist-Christian Encounter: From Buddha-Nature to the Divine Nature. By Peter Feldmeier. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2019. 261pp. $40.00 Reading and re-reading this complex work by Peter Feldmeier served as my accidental Advent discipline in the last days of 2019—a fortuitous if not providential coincidence. As comparative theology, it is both accessible and immensely learned; as devotional reading, it journeys toward a profoundly Christological destination. The book’s final sentence echoes the Heart Sutra, a key Buddhist text, to proclaim “the great mantra of life, the mantra that eliminates all suffering, all fear, all greed, all separation: alleluia hoti ebasileusen kurios ho theos ho pankrator” (231)—that is: Alleluia! For God, sovereign of the universe, reigns! (Rev. 19.6, my translation) If that’s not Advent material, I need another vocation. Although the final chapter allows “the philosophical presuppositions . . . in the prajnaparamita [ultimate wisdom] of Buddhism to ground the mystery of Christ” (230), this book does not try to synthesize the traditions or search for “the hidden Christian message in Buddhism” (6). It also does not provide a theology of religions or a broad spiritual vision. It is a Christian text that seeks “to help the reader enlarge her own soul” (10–11), shedding light on a Christian spirituality of practice through dialogue with Buddhist wisdom. Feldmeier, professor of Catholic studies at the University of Toledo (Ohio), wants to discern whether dialogue with “Buddhism enlarges our very sense of the sacred, of the cosmos, of ultimate things” (10). The answer, of course, is “yes.” Feldmeier refuses to flatten religious differences while presuming “that different religions, and in this case Buddhism and Christianity, are not so different, so incommensurable, that they cannot understand each other or learn from each other” (6). This search for mutual understanding and enrichment leads to compelling insights: Feldmeier understands Mahayana Buddhism as a theistic tradition; argues that Christians can have satori-like experiences akin to the “initial taste” of enlightenment in Zen Buddhism; and suggests that spiritual depth in both traditions does not necessarily lead to responsible ethics or uses of power. Chapter 1 introduces Feldmeier’s purpose and method, positioning the work as an effort to deepen mutual understanding and enrich Christian perspectives. Chapter 2 summarizes the Buddha’s teachings, especially those central to the text. The four middle chapters compare key concepts and thinkers. Chapter 3 looks at purification and the Dark Night by engaging Buddhaghosa and John of the Cross. Here, Feldmeier acknowledges different doctrinal and metaphysical commitments but affirms a shared agenda at the level of practice: “deconstruction of what and who you think you are” (57). Chapter 4 considers the via negativa of Christianity in light of the Madhyamika understanding of emptiness. Chapter 5 extends this reflection by placing Buddha-nature and the bodhisattva ideal into conversation with the mysticism of Meister Eckhart. Chapter 6 considers spiritual discernment in light of Shantideva and the spiritual exercises of Ignatius of Loyola. The book takes an implicit turn toward devotion in Chapter 7, “Zen Mind / Christian Mind.” Through rich developmental and ethical reflection, including attention to his own Christian satori, Feldmeier concludes that Zen overestimates the transformative power of enlightenment experiences. “I am convinced,” he writes, [End Page 115] “that conversion or radical realization, like all things human, has to be integrated, and the spiritual life has to continue to be cultivated in every aspect of one’s life for one to be fully holy or enlightened” (162). Attending sufficiently to the complexity of the human mind and the realities of finitude leads Feldmeier to a less idealistic vision of transformation. Chapter 8 offers a Christian commentary on the Zen ox-herding pictures as an account of spiritual development. Chapter 9 examines Buddhist experience and Christian grace, highlighting the Pure Land practice of nembutsu, the recitation of Amida Buddha’s name, and the Christian practice of the Jesus Prayer. Chapter 10 provides both a Christian commentary on the Heart Sutra and Feldmeier’s own “Christian Heart Sutra.” The book makes a distinct contribution to comparative theology...