Inadequacy Of Language Research Articles

Black Metal’s Apophatic Curse

Black metal uses negative language and negation as affirmation in the opposite direction to the Christian mystical tradition. Here, I argue that black metal completes the direction of negation to its proper conclusion in a turning away from God rather than using negative language to eulogise God. My first claim is that all worship is a form of curse, where negative theology demonstrates the inadequacy of language in its attempt to attest to the very thing it aims to affirm. I maintain that black metal demonstrates a consistency in apophatic thought where the mystical approach of Pseudo Denys and Meister Eckhart fail. Applying Milem’s desire theory and renunciation theory, and using lyrics from black metal bands, I argue that rather than negating the self, black metal’s apophatic approach reaffirms the self’s material existence in opposition to God. The affirmation rooted in negation of the bounded physical nature of humanity is the source from which a curse against the Christian God emanates.

Bécquer's Extrapolation to Express the Ineffable

Bécquer's Extrapolation to Express the Ineffable Ronald J. Quirk Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer was a poet of profound sensibility with keen insight into the human heart. His verses strive to convey the deepest sentiments of love, loss, rejection, and nostalgia. Yet, Bécquer always felt that language was unable to express his message; he struggled with the limitations of words to communicate.1 In the "Introducción sinfónica" to his works, Bécquer wrote: "Pero ¡ay, que entre el mundo de la idea y el de la forma existe un abismo que solo puede salvar la palabra; y la palabra, tímida y perezosa, se niega a secundar sus esfuerzos!" (Obras completas, Aguilar 50). In his Rimas Bécquer also laments this imprisonment within the constraints of language. In his famous Rima XI,2 which many editors place first in his collection of poems, he exclaims: Yo sé un himno gigante y extrañoque anuncia en la noche del alma una aurora, y estas páginas son de ese himnocadencias que el aire dilata en las sombras. Yo quisiera escribirle, del hombredomando el rebelde mezquino idioma, con palabras que fuesen a un tiemposuspiros y risas, colores y notas. [End Page 105] Pero en vano es luchar; que no hay cifracapaz de encerrarle, y apenas, ¡oh hermosa!, si teniendo en mis manos las tuyaspodría al oído cantártelo a solas.3 Poets who preceded Bécquer and others who have written after him have labored under the same sense of the inadequacy of language. The most prominent example is the sixteenth-century mystic San Juan de la Cruz. In the nineteenth century German and Spanish Romantics also complained of the confinement of language (Díaz 270-71, 327), and in the twentieth century Jonathan Mayhew pointed to "the major current in modern poetry that emphasizes the limits of language" (1151).4 In his Rima XI (I), cited above, Bécquer sees the only way of communicating completely and authentically as a person to be "apenas … teniendo en mis manos las tuyas, podría al oído cantártelo a solas." But as a poet he is left with the tools of his craft – words. In this Rima Bécquer also lists some of the attributes of the elusive words that would have the power to express his message. First is musicality – "cadencias" in line four, and "cantar" in the last line. He longs for words that would simultaneously be sounds and colors in lines seven and eight – "palabras que fuesen a un tiempo suspiros y risas, colores y notas." Suspiros, risas, and notas are oral but not verbal, and colores are visual. In other Rimas Bécquer makes use of the poet's customary oral devices, such as alliteration (e.g., "paso perezoso" in Rima LXVI [XL]) and onomatopeia (e.g., "balbucear breves palabras" in Rima XVI [XLII] and "suspirando pasa el viento murmurador" in Rima XLIII [XVI]), to enhance his words. However, the musicality, plasticity, and rhetorical devices of Bécquer's poetry are not the focus here. Bécquer employs another technique that I will explore, a technique that has not been adequately studied by critics and one that speaks not to the senses of hearing or sight, but instead directly to the intellect – the technique of extrapolation. This is an uncomplicated but effective stratagem. A solution to the challenge of conveying the ineffable is to extend the use of rational equations and calculations to express what is beyond reason and is incalculable. Bécquer, one of the most ethereal of poets, is not adverse to using the mathematical [End Page 106] formula a is to b as c is to d, represented as a:b :: c:d. Bécquer's expansion of the parallel a:b :: c:d to parallels beyond human ability to express, or even apprehend, can transcend the confinement of language. It is essentially a magnification, an extrapolation, of a second (or third) parallelism over the first to the immeasurable.5 Bécquer did not invent this technique; earlier poets and even folkloric poetry already contained it,6 but Bécquer uses it...

Itinerario poético del cuerpo en vértigo: el personaje de Alejandra Pizarnik y el valor ontologizador de la despersonalización del yo poético

El objetivo del presente trabajo es estudiar la relación entre el cuerpo y la palabra en la obra de la poeta argentina, Alejandra Pizarnik, con especial atención al fenómeno de la despersonalización del yo poético. La principal línea de investigación parte del concepto del valor ontologizador del lenguaje poético, puesto que es precisamente la relación que el sujeto tiene con el lenguaje la que define las tensiones principales de la poética de Pizarnik. El trabajo obsesivo sobre el lenguaje vincula a la poeta al concepto de fatum, el destino poético del sujeto, que introduciremos en nuestro análisis a partir del libro titulado La escritura invisible: El discurso autobiográfico en Alejandra Pizarnik publicado por Patricia Venti (2008a). La autora utiliza este concepto en relación con la creación poética pizarnikiana para demostrar que la poeta determina su destino poético a través de la imposibilidad del lenguaje, lo que conduce al sujeto hacia su disolución y a la poeta al suicidio.

Trauma and Fiction:

Trauma involves a rupture in the temporal and symbolic orders at individual and collective levels. Fictional representation of trauma, therefore, is marked by a problem of referentiality, where mimesis fails and chronology breaks down. The article opens with a discussion on the disorientation in the co-ordinative links between the world, the self, and representational tools in the event of a traumatic experience, which results in the crisis of referentiality. The inadequacy of language as a representational medium on the one hand, and unacknowledgement of extreme events beyond “socially validated reality” on the other, constitute two of the major issues creative artists have to deal with. An extreme event leaves a mnemonic gap in the psyche of the traumatized individual, and the process of recovery involves the gap being filled in with narrative memory, suggesting an epistemological void. Narrative memory acts as the surrogate memory of the traumatic event, which is unavailable to willed recollection. This surrogate memory is compared to Jean Baudrillard’s third order of simulation, where a false presence conceals the absence of any basic reality. Recognizing the referential and representational crises at work in rendering traumatic experiences in fiction, the article goes on to explore the ways of bypassing them and discuss the idea of indirect representation in Michael Rothberg’s Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation. Rothberg believes that an oblique rendition of traumatic events in fiction may be an appropriate representational mode within the conflicting demands of the documentation of reality, meditation on the formal limits by the creative artist, and risky circulation of images in the globalized world. This leads to a deliberation on Anne Whitehead and Laurie Vickroy’s idea of the emerging genre of “trauma fiction” with its thematic and stylistic concerns. The article ends with a summary of the representational techniques likely to feature in fictions written on violent events.

Belief and Acceptance for the Study of Religion

“Belief” in the study of religion has been vexed by complexities underlying the relationship between language, cognition, and religious behavior. Drawing on anthropological, sociological, and psychological literature, this article discusses the degrees and textures of “belief” to highlight the inadequacies of language and the variety of motivations for participating in rituals. Particular emphasis is given to discrimination, implicit bias, and the issue of discrepancy. The article argues that dual-process models of cognition provide a richer account of “belief” and then goes on to map an epistemological distinction between belief and acceptance as a viable methodology for the investigation of “belief” in the study of religion.

Fielding's Latitudinarian Doubt: Faith "versus" Works in Joseph Andrews

This essay challenges the assumption that Henry Fielding hated Methodism by taking an in-depth look at Fielding's treatment of Methodism in his Joseph Andrews . A comparison between Fielding's treatment of the faith versus works controversy in Joseph Andrews and coverage of the controversy in contemporary sermons, both Latitudinarian and Methodist, points out the inadequacies of language in these kinds of debates. The emerging genre of the novel, which provided a receptive ear to nuance in language, was thus an ideal vehicle for the expression of Fielding's Latitudinarian doubt. Joseph Andrews allowed Fielding the creation of Parson Adams, a fictional character whose views on Methodism and George Whitefield are not, as is generally alleged, necessarily representative of Fielding's views. In choosing to name Parson Adams after the biblical Abraham, or the Father of the Faithful, Fielding is not only questioning the parson's privileging of works and reason over faith, but also declaring his skepticism of the Latitudinarian privileging of works and reason. Perhaps Parson Adams's polemicist rant against enthusiasm is Fielding's attack on a shallow interpretation of justification by faith alone rather than a full-fledged attack upon the doctrine itself. Though it is often treated as Fielding's opportunity to be satirical, the parson's ineffectiveness, which can be seen as representative of the larger ineffectiveness of the Anglican Church, is a serious matter.

Mevlana ve Derrida Örneğinde Dilin Güvenilmezliği ve Yetersizliği

This article which we try to establish a connection with why mystical poetry tries to access to another language in explaining the truth, via the concept of “differance” of Derrida who is pioneer of deconstructivist theory that is translated in Turkish as “yapisokum, yapibozum” is about Derrida’s definition of inadequacy of language to express the reality and the allegation of Sufis that language’s insufficiency of expressing the “truth” in other words mystical-metaphysical reality. The point to be noted here is even though “reality” and “truth” concepts are used in quite different meanings from each other, the absolute and the precise meaning of any text or word can not be expressed in the sign system called “language”. Derrida defines that case as “differance” which is postponement of meaning, however the Sufi poets on Mevlana example, emphasize the inability of language and assert it’s impossibilities of utterance the truth and highlight the “silence” instead. In this sense, at the top headline of “language”, slippery nature of word and writing is far from including the certain sense. Therefore, it is not a realiable tool of expressing the secular reality or mystical truth.

« There is no God and we are his prophets » : le spectre du sens dans The Road , de Cormac McCarthy

The Road, by Cormac McCarthy, provides the reader with a post-Apocalyptic landscape in which words no longer correspond to any reality whatsoever. The anonymous father and son traveling along the road are akin to godless prophets bound to keep on yet with no hope for a future. This article aims at analyzing the way meaning emerges in this wasteland, in spite of the inadequacy of language and of the seeming lack of transcendence.

The War That Used Up Words: American Writers and the First World War by Hazel Hutchison (review)

Reviewed by: The War That Used Up Words: American Writers and the First World War by Hazel Hutchison Alice Kelly The War That Used Up Words: American Writers and the First World War. Hazel Hutchison. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2015. Pp. 26 + 242. $45.00 (cloth). Opening with a reading of a wartime poem by the non-canonical writer Mary Borden, the first pages of Hazel Hutchison’s The War That Used Up Words establish an ambition to destabilize our conceptions and categories of American First World War literature. Hutchison notes the strange place of the war in American cultural memory as a war which “has never quite captured the public imagination” and is usually focused through the “lost generation” writers of the 1920s: Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, et al. (14, 2). Hutchison instead chooses to study “a group of American authors who observed the war in Europe between 1914 and 1918, and who wrote about what they saw,” namely Mary Borden, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Ellen La Motte, Grace Fallow Norton, E. E. Cummings, and John Dos Passos (2). She makes the case for the distinctive nature of American First World War literature, suggesting that America’s initially neutral status and lack of censorship (until 1917) “allowed its authors and journalists an experimental and polemical freedom that was not available to British writers,” which “quickened their sense of the war as a cultural rather than a sociopolitical event” (3). In contrast to their European counterparts, “American readers had almost three years to think and read about the war before it became their national business” (119). Attempting to theorize and recategorize a diverse body of work (or at least to open up established categories), the success of Hutchison’s argument is in its amalgamation of biographical and historical information with close readings, its lively intellectual and imaginative engagement with the period, and its emphasis on lesser-known, but highly important, texts. Offering an overview of the profound changes that America’s involvement wrought on domestic social, political, economic, and military life, Hutchison argues that, most importantly, it gave the nation “a new sense of itself as … a powerful arbitrating presence on the international stage” (13). She suggests the belated nature of inquiries that look to 1920s writings for “the origins of traits which emerged so distinctly from the conflict: detachment, disillusionment, disparate perspectives, montage, irony, the renegotiation of gender, the disruption of time, the inadequacy of language” (3). She argues instead that “the really creative moment, the ignition spark of innovation, happened during the war,” whilst acknowledging the “many lines of continuity that run through the narrative of change” and citing writers such as Wharton, who “maintained her measured prose” after the war (3, 19). The War That Used Up Words therefore “aims to map that shift of balance from the old to the new,” which goes “in search of early glimpses of disillusionment, irony, and fragmentation” but “also seeks to understand the sense of social and political responsibility” that led writers to participate, and explores how their writings were received in the wartime publishing context (19). Put more simply, it is “about how the war first imprinted itself onto the patterns of American writing” (17). Positioning her scholarship amongst the recent broadening of the field of war studies to encompass previously marginalized aspects and experiences of the war (the colonial, gendered, medical, etc.), Hutchison suggests that “the group of writers at the heart of this study emerged distinctly from their surroundings, for reasons which … have over time become positively disruptive” (19-20). Her selection of authors, “all self-conscious literary artists, who had published in other areas before observing the war,” might seem strange, she tells us, “because it cuts across a number of the familiar categories and binary opposites within which writing of the war is more usually understood: modernist, conservative, pacifist, interventionist, male, female, young, old, canonical, obscure” (21). The sole connecting factor between her authors is their shared sense [End Page 266] that “artistic response had to be matched by action,” meaning that each was driven to participation in one mode or another (21). The consequent “intensely personal and autobiographical nature” of American First...

Transformations, Ideology, and the Real in Defoe’s “Robinson Crusoe” and Other Narratives: Finding “The Thing Itself.” by Maximillian E. Novak

Reviewed by: Transformations, Ideology, and the Real in Defoe’s “Robinson Crusoe” and Other Narratives: Finding “The Thing Itself.” by Maximillian E. Novak Nicholas Seager Maximillian E. Novak. Transformations, Ideology, and the Real in Defoe’s “Robinson Crusoe” and Other Narratives: Finding “The Thing Itself.”. Newark: Delaware, 2014. Pp. x + 239. $75. Defoe is sometimes accused of cobbling together the Serious Reflections during the Life and Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1720) out of a motley mix of unconnected essays written many years earlier. The present book comprises eleven of Mr. Novak’s previously published essays, some lightly (and tacitly) revised, with a new introduction and afterword. The oldest essay was originally published in 1982, though most are more recent: eight are from 2007 or later. Mr. Novak explains that the essays are “partly products of my writing the extensive notes and introductions to the three volumes” of Robinson Crusoe that will be published as part of the laggard Stoke Newington Daniel Defoe Edition. Collectively the essays situate Defoe as an experimental and innovative novelist during the “miraculous years of inventiveness and imagination” from 1718 to 1724 in which he produced his major prose fictions. Robinson Crusoe is the focus of all of the essays, though there are insightful comments on the author’s other [End Page 114] novels. No less than Defoe’s essays in the final part of Crusoe, Mr. Novak’s pieces hang together surprisingly well in their repurposed form. In Chapter 1, “Defoe as an Innovator of Fictional Form” (first published in The Cambridge Companion to the Eighteenth-Century Novel in 1996), Mr. Novak demonstrates that Defoe progressively explored ways of rendering “independent characters who tell their stories as emanations of their character and experiences,” as he advanced from works like A Continuation of Letters Written by a Turkish Spy (1718), through Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Moll Flanders (1722), to The Fortunate Mistress (1724). Mr. Novak shows in Chapter 2 how Defoe’s interest in the techniques of realist painting, and in Chapter 3 how his “sense of the inadequacy of language,” informed his practice as an imaginative writer. These aesthetic and intellectual contexts account not only for his vivid attempt to render “the Thing itself”—to find a form of verisimilitude that did justice to lived experience—but also for his conceptual investigation of the inherent difficulty of so doing. Defoe emerges not as a naïve realist and accidental novelist, but as a man with a vast range of interests that he brought to bear on the form and content of his fiction, whether as an effort to capture realistically a seascape during a torrent or to flag the deceptive uses of language by self-apologists like Roxana. Chapter 4 addresses Crusoe’s early reception, particularly Defoe’s playful yet persistent presentation of the novel, in the Serious Reflections, as an authentic memoir that is simultaneously allegorical and satirical. For Mr. Novak, neither autobiographical allegory nor topical satire satisfactorily explains Defoe’s generic achievement in Crusoe; he prefers the broader label “fiction,” which defines an imaginative work designed to entertain the reader by producing a “world vividly imagined” and foregrounding a “novelistic character, with a variety of emotions and a history that weighs on his memory.” But though Defoe was deliberately working out questions of form, including technique and genre, for Mr. Novak Defoe is above all an artist of ideas, who in Crusoe explored the complexity of social, ethical, and anthropological themes such as cannibalism (chapter 5), utopianism (chapter 6), seafaring (chapter 8), and exile (chapter 10). In these chapters, the practical-minded Defoe, the topical writer who was trying to ascertain how navigation might be improved and how colonies could be established in the Caribbean, exists alongside Defoe the thinker, prepared to investigate utopian possibilities despite his pessimism over their achievability and concerned with “exile as both a painful physical and a psychological state,” a metaphor and a real condition. The point is not just that Defoe simultaneously established a new realism committed to rendering the physical world and explored the multitudinously symbolic potential of fiction, but also that these aspects of his works are inseparable, just as the distinction...

Kiarostami’s Through the Olive Tree: A Postmodern Analysis

In the age of technology, films have become the most popular form to convey the message of art. With this issue in mind, the present study has examined Kiarostami’s Through the Olive Tree (1994) from a postmodern perspective. The postmodern techniques used for this research are similar to those applied in literary studies. Through this investigation, it has been suggested that Abbas Kiarostami’s Through the Olive Tree has some common features with a postmodern novel. In this respect, both focus on the instability of meaning and the inadequacy of language to thoroughly exhibit the truth. Accordingly, Kiarostami has more focused on the process of filmmaking to convey his message. In conclusion, he has emphasized the significance of audiences’ involvement in a film by using postmodern techniques.

Byron’s Love Letters

Byron’s love letters are often rather conventional. One can sometimes suspect he is going through the motions when writing letters to lovers. Yet his love letters have more to tell us than they might at first appear to. This essay reads a sample of these letters via a number of key passages from Byron’s poetry, in which Byron stresses both the inadequacy of language to express emotion and thought and the power of language to produce emotion and thought. It suggests that the conventionality of Byron’s love letters is Byron’s way of both navigating language’s expressive limitations and deploying its emotive power. The love letters that the essay looks at seek to seduce their recipients into, rather than just with, feeling – indeed they use language’s expressive inadequacy to do this. As they do so, they reveal something fundamental about Byron not just as a lover but also as a writer.

Culture and Commerce in Conrad's Asian Fiction by Andrew Francis

Reviewed by: Culture and Commerce in Conrad's Asian Fiction by Andrew Francis Joyce Wexler (bio) Andrew Francis. Culture and Commerce in Conrad's Asian Fiction. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. 228 pp. 9781107093980. Andrew Francis's book may become as indispensable to Conrad's Asian fiction as The Golden Bough has been to The Waste Land. Francis brings detailed knowledge of commerce to Conrad's stories about European traders in Asia. While critics concerned with economic factors usually rely on generalizations about capitalism, Francis focuses on the particulars of commercial codes and legal regulations. He regards commerce as a "phenomenology" that is a more reliable source of knowledge than words, arguing that Conrad's accounts of trade compensate for the "inadequacies of language" (6). Francis bases his argument on the financial records of British and Dutch trading companies, legal documents, and accounting practices. He uses this archival research to familiarize readers with the period's business norms. Bypassing the usual criteria for assessing Conrad's Asian texts, his readings amplify the irony of the narrative voice and magnify the significance of material conditions. Texts that have been considered second rate become more interesting when explanations of trade move background information into the foreground. For example, Francis argues that double-entry bookkeeping represents "the force of Western culture" because it is "crucial to commercial success in the increasingly globalized world" (57). This accounting method provided controls that allowed corporations to raise capital and operate across vast distances. Francis points out that traders with "access to larger capital resources and bigger trade networks, whether Arab, Chinese, or European" displaced independent owner-captains (22). As the technology of steam replaced sailing, the independent shipowner could no longer compete with corporate-financed steamships. This kind of information helps readers perceive nuances of meaning between the extremes of scrupulous probity and the blatant criminality of slave trading, arms dealing, smuggling, and prostitution. Francis shows that [End Page 143] ledgers, like heads on stakes, can reveal ethical, moral, and psychological subtleties. In the chapter titled "Negotiating the Nets of Commerce and Duty: Lord Jim," Francis proposes that commerce provides another set of norms for judging Jim. In addition to legal and marine codes, Francis applies "commercial standards" as articulated in regulations covering bankruptcy, commissions, exchange rates, and fraud (85). Marlow insists that Jim's life can't be understood by facts alone, yet readers must at least know how Jim's contemporaries understood the "externals" (87). Given this context, Francis argues, readers can appreciate important differences between Jim and Stein. Stein is a paragon of integrity: his abilities are "illuminated as much as anything by his commercial record, which demonstrates the relevance of matters of conduct in the field of economic endeavor which connects humanity" (109). Unlike Jim, Stein is "trustworthy" (110). Illustrating the phenomenological thesis of the book, Francis points out that "the facts of his [Stein's] commercial life, in which the ethical and the economic are linked, speak for themselves, perhaps more so than his memorable utterances" (116). Thus, Francis argues, "Stein is Conrad's supreme portrait of the possibility of the productive presence of business in a rounded, imaginative life" (108). Shifting the critical discussion of Lord Jim from ethical quandaries to quotidian acts, Francis argues, "Commerce is not only a common experience of most of mankind, but also offers a metaphorical framework in which people's lives are lived in the everyday dimensions of time and space" (115). Francis's explanation of economic conditions also leads to a new interpretation of The Rescue. Aware of the practical constraints on adventurers like Tom Lingard, Francis defends the novel against the chorus of critics who regard it as an albatross that Conrad carried for twenty years. The common view is that the novel fails because Conrad was incapable of writing about sex or women, but Francis regards Lingard as a representative case rather than an individual who succumbs to passion. In this reading, Edith Travers is an independent woman who tries to resist "her society's severe limitations on her role" (73). Francis persuasively claims that in a broader cultural context, the novel is a "more successful depiction of romantic and...

Waltz with Bashir: between representation and experience

How to represent extreme, traumatic experience has long been a predicament in social science and literary criticism. This quandary is sometimes dealt with by claiming that such experiences are forgotten or leave their victims claiming they have had experiences that are too horrific to represent. This explanation leads to the position that representation is distinctly different from experience, and indeed insufficient by comparison. Waltz with Bashir (Folman 2008) is a recent text (at once a feature-length animated documentary film and a graphic novel) that deliberately employs a riotous combination of ‘languages’ of representation to probe the apparent inadequacies of language for representing extreme, traumatic experience. The aim of this article is to utilise Folman's text to challenge this apparently rigid distinction between experience and representation, and demonstrate the possibility of representation standing in for or becoming experience. Profoundly blurring the boundary between experience and representation in this way facilitates a richer explanation of the case of memory loss due to trauma and allows the recouping of some experiences that have previously been thought of as too horrific to represent. As a representation of an experience that he cannot remember, Folman's text, constituted largely through others’ representations of the same events, becomes a substitute for his own lost experience. This text becomes both Folman's experience and his representation of events that were too traumatic for him to integrate at the time of their occurrence (the Lebanese War of 1982). Žižek's insistence on representation as a necessary part of the experience of violence and the experience of violence as needing to be indirect and inclusive of distance are drawn upon to enrich the explanation of what happens in memory loss. Here memory loss after ‘unrepresentable, horrifying experiences’ is referred to, where access to experience is usually thought of as hindered by the inadequacies of representation. As such, the representational techniques used in Waltz with Bashir combine to form a lavish literary trace – somewhere between experience and representation. This enables the construction of an inaccurate and fractured, yet intense and authentic version of well-known traumatic events that can be utilised in seeking a meaningful account of these occurrences.

Christopher Smart'sSystema Naturae: Anti-Newtonianism and the Categorical Impulse inJubilate Agno

This article explores Christopher Smart's poetic emphasis on reading the world correctly in the face of contemporary religious and empirical anxieties about the incapacity of human ideas to frame the natural world and the inadequacy of language to describe, name and categorise it. Tracing a development from religious restraint to a new kind of botany, the article concentrates on four themes: the inability to express the divine and the risk of vanity in science in the poet's early work, Smart's rejection of scientific language, and his categorical impulse in Jubilate Agno, which orders his natural subjects into a new physico-theology.

Review Essay: Ordinary Glory: The Art of Breaking Bread with the Dead, Epiphanies, Morning Knowledge, Reading God's Handwriting

Epiphanies. Kim Bridgford. Cincinnati, OH: David Roberts Books, 2013. Pp. 53. Morning Knowledge. Kevin Hart. Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame Press, 2011. Pp. 86. Reading God's Handwriting. Philip C. Kolin. St. Simon's Island, GA: Kaufmann Publishing, 2012. Pp. 105. My are shining like washed gold. Like gold from what-you-will freed: cobwebs, mold, rust, anonymous mud-and plunged in icy waver of water to flash at hot sun. They come shining happily inside a moment translated only now so long after. They arrive in comfort of comrades and a nimbus of silence. Accurate and able they shine in cleared from clock's confusion that held them distant, aghast. --Josephine Jacobsen, Arrivals W. H. Auden once famously claimed art is our chief means of breaking bread with dead He also added, without communion with dead, a human is impossible. Three recent books of poems provide powerful witness to truth of Auden's assertions. Kevin Hart's Morning Knowledge is a collection of elegies wherein poet movingly encounters his dead, finding them in odd places at odd moments of his day--his mother in his study evening on anniversary of her passing, an old friend and fellow poet afternoon in thick of summer light, and, most often, his father who comes on random windy nights to bid his son goodnight. Kim Bridgford's Epiphanies creates communion with historical and mythic dead. Old Testament figures, such as Noah, Sarah, Moses, and Job, and New Testament characters, including Mary and Joseph, Lazarus and Mary Magdalene, and Christ himself, speak eloquently in these pages, offering intimate accounts of their encounters with Holy of Holies and their struggle against human error and limitation. Despite their fame and pedigree, these august presences sound, for all world, like ourselves. Philip C. Kolin's poems in Reading God's Handwriting engage both celebrated and obscure dead. The narratives and soliloquies of biblical figures featured in these poems are interspersed with those of men and women, friends and family poet honors and remembers by putting their stories next to those of seers and saints. Each of these books is deeply moving in its way, courageous in poet's willingness to conjure dead, imaginative in its depiction of them in their ordinary glory and generous in its impulse to give reader access to fully human life that poetry at its best provides. Morning Knowledge is Kevin Hart's ninth book of poems. Lauded as the most outstanding Australian poet of his generation and one of major living poets in English Hart is also a chaired professor of theology, philosophy, and literature at University of Virginia and at Australian Catholic University. Hart's poems are grounded in deep learning, yet poet manages to wear that learning lightly. The evocative and multivalent title of book suggests theological idea conceived by St. Augustine and further elaborated on by St. Thomas Aquinas, that of morning as knowledge in potentia, by means of word rather than through experience. As such it is imperfect or incomplete knowledge. This is a theme Hart sounds throughout his poems--the inadequacy of language to speak unspeakable, unrelenting search for right words despite impossibility of finding them, and, most poignantly, silence of God (whom Hart addresses, notably, as One) who speaks to us in words we can neither hear nor understand: Leaves shine with birdsong, and are calm. Ah Dark One, let me hear you speak to me-- Inside half-buried words, if that must be, Words left in books where they can do no harm. Or words that open so that I might see A summer farmland where fine light is grain And grows straight up to where fierce seraphs reign. …

Towards a pedagogy of the incomprehensible: trauma and the imperative of critical witness in literacy classrooms

In this article, I explore questions about what it means to carry, live and invite traumatic stories into the space of a literacy classroom. Weaving illustrative moments from the classroom with trauma theory and research, I ask, What does it mean to embrace the incomprehensible in literacy classrooms? How might the incomprehensible be viewed as a productive and connected space in students’ academic and social experiences in schools? To delve into these questions, I turn to scholars who conceptualize trauma and its relationship with what we can access through and at the limits of articulation and to two young children’s writing and talk. In particular, I situate children’s experiences in trauma studies scholar Caruth’s ideas about the inadequacy of language in the face of trauma and cultural theorist Massumi’s arguments about affect as that which escapes our efforts to structure experience. I argue that incomprehensibility invokes an important metaphorical space of not knowing that demands reciprocal approaches testimony and critical witness responses that can serve to collapse the binaries so often employed in efforts to make sense of children’s lives and literacies.

The Loseable World: Resonance, Creativity, and Resilience

The Loseable World: Resonance, Creativity, and Resilience

Kierkegaard, Fire, and the Prolixity of Filling Time

Abstract: According to Marthe Robert, the novel Don Quixote raises the question of the truth of literature: “What place do books have in reality? Are they absolutely true or true only relatively?… If they are false, their very fascination makes them useless or harmful and they must be rendered null and void, or better still, burned.” This article explores the pertinence of this question to the writings of Kierkegaard, who was preoccupied by images of fire and burning as well as by questions of the ultimate adequacy of literature, including his own “prolix literature,” to communicate Christian truth. Throughout his authorial career, and increasingly in his final years, Kierkegaard expresses concerns over what Johannes Climacus calls “the inadequacy of language.” Incited by Jesus's arsonist declaration “I came to cast fire upon the earth” (Luke 12:49), which he invokes as part of his attack on the established Danish Church, Kierkegaard becomes convinced that the “prolixities” of false Christendom “must go.” Yet, as his journals and authorship reveal, he remains haunted to the end of his life by thoughts about his (and his pseudonyms’) own sheer verbosity, his authorial needs for “filling up” time and narrative, and the ultimate “superficiality” of his literary vocation.

The Certainties of History and the Uncertainties of Representation in Post-Holocaust Writing

The Certainties of History and the Uncertainties of Representation in Post-Holocaust Writing