Reviewed by: Illuminating Darkness: Approaches to Obscurity and Nothingness in Literature Shira Wolosky Päivi Mehtonen, ed. Illuminating Darkness: Approaches to Obscurity and Nothingness in Literature. Helsinki: Finnish Academy of Science and Letters, 2007. 219 pp. Illuminating Darkness presents a series of essays variously connected to notions of negation and obscurity in literature and literary theory. The essays are wide-ranging, across literary periods and languages, as well as philosophical, theoretical, and religious engagements — all of which introduce variations of the notions of nothingness. No consistent definition or understanding of negation in literature emerges from the collection, but such a definition is also clearly not its goal. Rather, each essay examines the shapes of negation in different literary contexts. One unifying strength in the collection, despite its variety of approach, is the very high level of scholarship and the very up-to-date bibliographies and discussions in each essay. Anyone interested in how topics of negation are being addressed in contemporary discourses would benefit from reading this book. The first group of essays, under the heading “Myths of the Unknown and the Materiality of Language,” are largely literary-historical. They examine writers from Dante to Early Modern English corpus, from Dryden to German Romanticism, as well as considerations of genre, such as aphorism, and of topoi, such as literary uses of Pan. Thus, the first essay by Pekka Kuusisto, “Closing in Sublunary Darkness? On the ‘Material Vision’ in Dante’s and Paul de Man’s Cosmos,” places medieval and modern discussions against the core background of Augustinian typology. Tina Skouen’s “What I Desire the Reader Should Know Concerning Me: John Dryden’s ‘The Hind and the Panther’” focuses on rhetoric; Sari Kivisto’s “Pan Hour: Midday as a Moment of Epiphany, Nothingness and Poetical Illusion” traces the figure of Pan across literary history. “Textual Voyages Beyond the Pillars of Hercules” by Maria Salenius explores the “unknown” in terms of cosmological change in the Early Modern period, with special emphasis on John Donne. Salenius reflects on theological implications of these momentous changes in the maps of the world, both in geographical and astronomical senses, and their cultural importance both to the Reformation and to Humanism as both focus on language (51). The essay particularly explores John Donne’s ambivalence to this new learning even as he inscribes it in a wide range of texts, with the trope of “nothingness” here linked to the “unknown” of these newly opening and destabilizing worlds. The most theoretical among this first group of essays is Anders Olsson’s “Aphoristic Obscurity.” Beginning with a discussion of Friedrich Schlegel’s “Über die Unverstandlichkeit” (“On Incomprehensibility”), this article ranges from German Romanticism in Schlegel and Herder back to Greek and Latin Antiquity, then forward to French Classicism and Modernism. Nietzsche and Blanchot emerge as backdrops to broad questions of interpretative stances, genres and contemporary concerns such as textual materiality, with the aphorism as central axis of discussion. Traced through the essay is a transformation of aphorism from a mode of truth claim to that of fragment and incompletion, with the [End Page 225] philosophical and theoretical implications this transformation implies for modernism and post-modernism. Such theoretical interest governs the articles in the second section of the volume, under the heading “Nothingness and Literature.” These essays focus on contemporary writers and thinkers, notably Heidegger, Blanchot, and Derrida. Leena Kaakinen’s “Nothingness and Absence in the Poetry of Wislawa Szymborska” has the special interest of bringing into discussion a Polish poet less familiar to most Western readers. Here the focus is on how contemporary discourses of Nothingness draw on and reflect traditional mystical discourses, such as Meister Eckhart’s, and the philosophical discourses of Heidegger. In both the poet Szymborska and Heidegger Nothing is the ground of Being, as a foundational anxiety but also, or thereby, a creative power. As Kaakinen writes, “in this way, anxiety is a kind of illumination — finding oneself on the edge of nothingness, where the ground of existence is revealed” (130), which in turn links Heidegger to earlier discourses, including Meister Eckhart’s. To what extent this modern nothing — or, the author argues, the medieval one for that matter — does or does not...