Protestant Poetics Research Articles

The Poetics of Protest, from Africa to Minneapolis

Abstract Offering an itinerary of the thinking that led to Sentient Flesh: Thinking in Disorder, Poiēsis in Black, R. A. Judy explains the concept of “poetic socialities” mentioned in it. This explanation begins with an account of the Muslim peripatetic philosophers’ reception of Aristotle’s Poetics, focusing on ibn Sīnā’s conception of the role poetic expression’s cognitive as well as affective force plays in the instantiation of what he calls الأمة الشعرية (al-umma al-sh’irīya), “the poetic or aesthetic community.” Elaborating how and why the phrase poetic socialities is the paraphrastic translation of ibn Sīnā’s, the essay tracks the study of poetic socialites from its initial formulation regarding the 2010 Tunisian Revolution to it becoming the reference point of orientation for an interrogation of the modern concepts of sovereignty, revolution, and civic republicanism. With respect to these concepts, the study of poetic socialities enacts a critique of imperial neoliberal tendency of socialization; whereby the only tenable norm of general subjectivity is a function of speculative market value as the absolute measure not just of human progress but existence as well. Along these lines, poetic socialities is an attempt at understanding something of what is at play in te current era of popular unrest.

Obtaining Grace: Poetic Language and the Language of Reform in Astrophil and Stella

ABSTRACT This article examines the treatment of grace in Sidney’s sonnet-sequence, Astrophil and Stella, to interrogate the place of secular lyric within Protestant poetics. Although Protestant poetics is now understood to cover a range of positions—from a purist model of language that emphasizes the unbridgeable gap between a divine Logos and fallen human words (a “cult of the signified”), to a more sacramental model that sees humanity’s world and words as suffused with the spirit (a “cult of the sign”)—both share an assumption that life is meaningful and that God makes it so. Sidney follows Petrarch in breaking with these models, using poetic language and poetic form (a “cult of the signifier”) to show how much more there is to language than signification alone. Ultimately, grace and God are to be found as much in rhythm, rhyme, wordplay, music, and sound, as in those elements of language that signify.

The Johannine Renaissance in Early Modern English Literature and Theology. Paul Cefalu. Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. viii+352.

<i>The Johannine Renaissance in Early Modern English Literature and Theology</i>. Paul Cefalu. Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. viii+352.

George Herbert and the Mystery of the Word: Poetry and Scripture in Seventeenth-Century England. Gary Kuchar. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Pp. xv+288.

<i>George Herbert and the Mystery of the Word: Poetry and Scripture in Seventeenth-Century England</i>. Gary Kuchar. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Pp. xv+288.

Rock music and politics in Poland: The poetics of protest and resistance in the lyrics of rock songs

Polska scena rockowa i punkowa służyła przez dziesięciolecia jako medium wyrażania antysystemowych wartości. W latach 80. XX wieku, w czasie mrocznych dni stanu wojennego, grupy, takie jak Manaam, Perfect, TSA i Brygada Kryzys szydziły i satyrycznie traktowały władze komunistyczne; ostatnia z nich przestała grać w 1983 roku, po wprowadzeniu stanu wojennego, ale została reaktywowana w roku 1990. Od czasu „wielkiego wybuchu” w 1989 roku zmienili się zarówno gracze związani z establishmentem, jak i natura opozycji rockowej. Zamiast komunizmu obecnie kapitalizm jest postrzegany jako główne wyzwanie przez niektóre zespoły rockowe i punkowe. Polska scena muzyczna jest zatem miejscem występowania różnorodnych perspektyw ideologicznych i muzycznych. Wszystkie odzwierciedlają dylematy współczesnego polskiego społeczeństwa z jego nierównościami, wyzwaniami tożsamościowymi i polaryzacją.

Europejskie performanse Ive Tabara – od dyskursu politycznego do metanarracji

The article is an attempt to analyze the works of Ive Tabar – one of the most interesting Slovenian artists (relatively little known) working on the borderline of body art and performance art. On the one hand, Tabar’s works refer to loud experiments – undertaken on the basis of body art in 60’s, 70’s and 80’s. On the other hand, they are seeking their own language and new communication strategies with the viewers. Tabar’s works are both personal acts and political declarations (regarding the future of Slovenia). In this sense, they can be understood as a return to the concept (that had been developed in Europe and America in the second half of the twentieth century) of engaging art for public activity. Tabar uses this tradition in its own and unique way. He creates metanarratives works that combine the poetics of political and social protest with a radical body art-style experiment. He shows the way how art can contribute a political life.Key words: Slovenian performance, Ive Tabar, body art, performing arts.

Surprise: The Poetics of the Unexpected from Milton to Austen. Christopher R. Miller. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015. Pp. vii+269.

<i>Surprise: The Poetics of the Unexpected from Milton to Austen</i>. Christopher R. Miller. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015. Pp. vii+269.

Social Protest and the Absence of Legalistic Discourse: In the Quest for New Language of Dissent

Legalistic discourse, lawyers and lawyering had minor representation during the 2011 summer protest events in Israel. In this paper we explore and analyze this phenomena by employing content analysis on various primary and secondary sources, among them structured personal interviews with leaders and major activists involved in the protest, flyers, video recordings made by demonstrators and songs written by them. Our findings show that participants cumulatively produced a pyramid-like structure of social power that is anchored in the enterprise of organizing the protest. Our findings explicate how the non-legalistic and even anti-legalistic discourse of the protest was formed, shaped and generated within the power relations of the protest, and how a pyramid of power produced a new poetics of protest that rejected the traditional poetics of state law. The power relations that generated the discourse regarding state law were embedded in socioeconomic stratification along the divide of center and periphery in Israel.

Interior Description and Perspective in Deloney and Bunyan

I. Described Interiors and Perspectival RepresentationThe essays in this special issue investigate question of how interior spaces were rendered before widespread use of narrative techniques such as free indirect discourse, which permit internal focalization on a fictional world and its contents (among other effects). The strong metaphorical relation between inside of a room (and its contents) and inside of a mind (and its thoughts and perceptions) has been reinforced in literary criticism both by terminology of insides and inwardness and by literary history. Indeed, sense of that indicates beginning of a modern subjectivity has been associated with Renaissance lyric poetry of Thomas Wyatt, Philip Sidney, William Shakespeare, and John Donne (Ferry) and with soliloquys of Elizabethan stage.1 This project began with a search through early modern prose fiction for descriptions of interiors so that they might in turn be examined for traces of perspectivism.A cognitivist approach would suggest that an association of interiors of physical spaces and perceptions is a nearly inevitable consequence of human embodied consciousness and natural language.2 George Lakoff writes, the CONTAINER schema is inherently meaningful to people by virtue of their bodily (Lakoff 273). Building on work of Mark Johnson, Lakoff explains that body-based experience of our human selves as containers that exist inside containers such as buildings (272) predisposes us to treat boundaries of our visual field as walls of a container (e.g., of sight, out of mind) and to extrapolate spatial metaphors for consciousness such as knowing is seeing and mind is a body moving in space (Lakoff and Turner 158). The metaphorical relation can also be directed inward, as when an individual's mind, like a room, is represented as open, closed, cluttered, or even furnished with books.A culturally and historically sensitive cognitivism should be open to different expressions of container schemas in earlier literary periods, and literary history does indeed note their presence, with variations. A Cartesian image of body as container for soul-lodged in flesh like pilot of a ship-locates perceptive soul looking outwards and steering self {the mind moves body in space)? Other early modern images employ container schema to pry into its metaphorical contents. A locus classicus for representation of a mind as a container for books occurs in Book 2 of Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene (1590). Spenser represents memory as a library filled with books and decaying scrolls inside skull of House of Alma, which itself takes form of a body containing Alma, soul.4 In part because of religious allegories that associate consciousness, memory, visuality, and soul, as in this Spenserian example, inwardness has been tethered to a Protestant poetics of emblems, meditations, and progresses of soul.5 Inwardness is an Anglo-Saxon word of ancient vintage, while according to OED first usage of to indicate inner character or nature dates to 1701, beginning of century of novel. English literary history associates closeted self-examination of Protestant conscience with development of early novel's themes of containment and emergent consciousness, as in Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740), where Pamela retreats to a private room to pour out her heart in letters.In historical period between Renaissance meditative lyric of inward eye and interiority of early eighteenth-century novel falls period of emergent early novel, represented here by fiction of Thomas Deloney (c. 1543-1600) and John Bunyan (1628-1688). Writing about sixteenth-century romances, Elizabeth Hart asks when writers' techniques developed intermental and intramental subframes discussed by Alan Palmer (2004). …

“Entre deux feux”: Jean Sénac's Struggle for Self-Determination

During the years between 1954 and 1965, which witnessed the construction of a new Algerian national identity, Jean Senac, the most important French- language poet associated with Algerian nationalism, was struggling to establish a sense of self, both at the collective level of the Nation and on the individual level of the Man. By the end this decade of self-determination Senac would fashion the complex nature of his national and sexual identi- ties into an authentic poetics of social protest. In Senac's works, produced after Algerian independence, he openly proclaims himself to be a gaouri— the Algerian pejorative for a foreigner or infidel—as well as a homosexual. However, Senac's stance on the margins came after more than a decade in which he struggled with the fear that his non-normative identity was an obstacle to be overcome if he wanted to be a poet in service to his people.

“Entre deux feux”: Jean Séénac's Struggle for Self-Determination

During the years between 1954 and 1965, which witnessed the construction of a new Algerian national identity, Jean Sénac, the most important French-language poet associated with Algerian nationalism, was struggling to establish a sense of self, both at the collective level of the Nation and on the individual level of the Man. By the end this decade of self-determination Sénac would fashion the complex nature of his national and sexual identities into an authentic poetics of social protest. In Sénac’s works, produced after Algerian independence, he openly proclaims himself to be a gaouri—the Algerian pejorative for a foreigner or infidel—as well as a homosexual. However, Sénac’s stance on the margins came after more than a decade in which he struggled with the fear that his non-normative identity was an obstacle to be overcome if he wanted to be a poet in service to his people.

George Herbert, Calvinism, and Reading “Mattens”

In November 1973 Dame Helen Gardner, distinguished editor of Donne and Herbert, wrote me, saying think study of Herbert as 'Calvinist' would be very valuable thing to do (letter to author). Since then literary critics including Barbara Lewalski, Richard Strier, Gene Veith, Christopher Hodgkins, Elizabeth Clarke, Ron Cooley, Cristina Malcolmson, and I have been claiming that George Herbert is significantly Calvinist. Far from reflecting credulity about Lewalski's Protestant Poetics and Seventeenth-Century English Lyric (1979), as Stanley Stewart suggests (A Priest to Geneva Temple 167), such interpretations in fact follow up fruitful suggestions made as early as Joseph Summers' ground-breaking book in 1954. While Rosemond Tuve, Louis Martz (The Poetry of Meditation), and R. V. Young have effectively related elements in Herbert to continental medieval and Roman Catholic backgrounds, other writers named have paid attention to recent historical insights into English church, main leadership of which in most of Herbert's time was Calvinist (Collinson, Fincham, Lake, Tyacke). But objections by Martz (Donne, Herbert, and Worm of Controversy, The Generous Ambiguity of Herbert's Temple), Stewart (Priest), and Young (Doctrine and Devotion in Seventeenth-Century Poetry) to Protestant interpretations deserve an answer. As Stewart notes (Priest 168), there is tendency for critics to pay most attention to those poems or writings in Herbert they find most appealing, or about which they feel equipped to write. That approach should be supplemented and corrected by considering case made for other views. It is no accident that Herbert has attracted good critics with many different approaches, because, as I argue elsewhere (Doerksen, Generous' Ambiguity Revisited), this poet was deliberately reaching out to people of different viewpoints within and outside his church. Herbert scholarship is, and should be, joint enterprise. Critics who use term should explain what they mean by it. William J. Bouwsma in Encyclopaedia Britannica Online says Calvinism is the theology advanced by John Calvin ... and its development by his [Also,] doctrines and practices derived from works of Calvin and his followers.... Historian Anthony Milton, in an important book on Church of from 1600-1640, defines English Calvinism as a general sympathy with continental Reformed tradition in all its purely doctrinal aspects, and sense of identification with West European Calvinist Churches and their fortunes (8). This definition silently acknowledges that other writers, such as Bucer and Bullinger, and of course English ones, were influential in movement. Milton also recognizes that Calvinism, like other aspects of Early Modern Church of England, comprised range of views, and changed as it developed. Milton's definition of Calvinism includes Herbert, who had an enduring in success of international Protestantism (Malcolmson 21)--an interest not shared by Laudians. (1) More specifically, English Calvinism had doctrinal core of Protestant theology, emphasizing God's grace. Although Calvinism was not tied exclusively to writings of Calvin, in those writings were widely circulated and had enormous significance. According to Pettegree, tally of revised Short Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, 1475-1640 indicates that English editions of Calvin's works easily outstripped all other continental writers, and dwarfed production of native English theologians (281). Pettegree reports that Leedham-Green's substantial survey of books recorded in Cambridge wills, carefully analyzed, confirms the preeminent position of Calvin as dominant theological influence in Elizabethan England (280). Also, he cites Francis Higman's bibliographical studies showing that was far and away biggest market for Calvin's work in translation. …

:Shakespeare's Christianity: The Protestant and Catholic Poetics of "Julius Caesar", "Macbeth", and "Hamlet"

This volume explores the influences of Catholicism and Protestantism in a trio of Shakespeare's tragedies: Julius Caesar, Macbeth and Hamlet. Bypassing the discussion of Shakespeare's personal religious beliefs, Batson instead focuses on distinct footprints left by Catholic and Protestant traditions that underlie and inform Shakespeare's artistic genius.

Book Review: Shakespeare's Christianity: The Protestant and Catholic Poetics of Julius Caesar, Macbeth, and Hamlet

Book Review: Shakespeare's Christianity: The Protestant and Catholic Poetics of Julius Caesar, Macbeth, and Hamlet

The Integration of Western Modernism in Postcolonial Arabic Literature: a study of Abdul-Wahhab Al-Bayati's Third World poetics

Undermining the narrow critical approaches which neglect the potential intersection between modernism and postcolonialism, this paper explores the attempt by contemporary Arab poets to engage Western modernist heritage in order to articulate domestic narratives integral to the geopolitics of the Arab region in the postcolonial era. In an attempt to redefine tradition and deviate from fossilised inherited legacies and tyrannical regimes, postcolonial Arab writers, led by the Iraqi poet, Abdul-Wahhab Al-Bayati, pursue solace and redemption inWwestern modernism, developing Western forms into a poetics of resistance and protest. Through textual apprenticeship, assimilated from Western literature and culture, they combine modernism and postcolonialism into a nexus incorporating Western techniques while emphasising variants and displacements between their nationalist perspective and that of their Western forebears. Convinced of the role played by the West in the shaping of modern Arabic cultural traditions, Al-Bayati reconstructs colonial modernism as a narrative of liberation, engaging in dialogues with Western pioneering writers and masterpieces. Transforming Western modernist strategies into a revolutionary construct, Al-Bayati aims to challenge internal oppression and external hegemony. Through tran-cultural entanglement and textual appropriation of Western narratives he provides diversity and insight into postcolonial Arabic poetry, intensifying the awareness of other traditions and reconstructing his own heritage.

Shakespeare's Christianity: The Catholic and Protestant Poetics of Julius Caesar, Macbeth, and Hamlet

Shakespeare's Christianity: The Catholic and Protestant Poetics of Julius Caesar, Macbeth, and Hamlet

Bliss Lost, Wisdom Gained: Contemplating Emblems and Enigmas in Anne Bradstreet's "Contemplations"

Bliss Lost, Wisdom Gained:Contemplating Emblems and Enigmas in Anne Bradstreet's "Contemplations" Michael G. Ditmore (bio) Long an anthology staple, Anne Bradstreet's "Contemplations" (first published posthumously, 1678) is immovably embedded in the core canon of early American literature and has been rightly accorded a copious amount of appreciative, even admiring critical treatments and source studies. Although not the most immediately appealing of works for latter-day readers, it is at once her most ambitious, most complex, and most artistically accomplished poem, but it is not without its puzzles and discordances, many of which have been critiqued while others remain unacknowledged. The poem's most obvious feature is its religious dimension, so that it has generally been received as a forceful, exemplary instance of Bradstreet's professed Christian faith articulated in poetic terms. Its religiosity has been construed to be roughly that of her New England contemporaries and their Calvinist predecessors, whether she has been perceived as advocating or discreetly subverting those views, admixed with prevalent Protestant poetics. However we gauge the nature of her subversion, resistance, or disquiet in religious terms, outwardly her poems, including "Contemplations," maintain a conformist, or non-alarmist, posture.1 But the assumptions that undergird such readings, on both sides, tend to distract attention from the poem itself; that is, from the religious and theological conclusions we might draw from a focusing on the wording, symbolic network, allusive resonances (classical and scriptural), and thematic movements of the poem, without jettisoning background material for a work so historically remote. Considered by its own internal dynamics, the poem's overall design hardly resembles the structure of a well-planned treatise or Ramistically arranged sermon—or even most extant published examples of devotional and emblematic verse, meditation, and contemplation, all of which are more commonly characterized by a structural coherence [End Page 31] and Christian thematic clarity not immediately evident in Bradstreet's poem.2 I offer a reading that presents "Contemplations" more as an anomaly of devotional expression and thus not quite what critical readers have taken it to be. While composed by a professing Christian within a practicing Christian community, "Contemplations" is a mostly secular wisdom poem evocative of the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes and its grim view of human vanity; its Renaissance humanist concerns for mutability and mortality exploit scriptural allusions and theological nuances without advancing an identifiably soteriological theme, the absence of which necessarily complicates its status as an apparently devotional-type poem in a Christian culture. A reasonable paraphrase of "Contemplations" (with some supporting context) might run as follows: "Some time now past" (l. 1), on the scriptural model of the patriarch Isaac (Gen. 24:63) and certainly like countless sixteenth- and seventeenth-century godly English practitioners of Christian devotional disciplines, the speaker solitarily ventures into nature at eventide to consider the Deity's providential handiwork in the physical creation and thereafter to follow the train of her moral and spiritual reflections on divinity, temporality, and the human condition, juxtaposed against nature. She proceeds by way of what was then a conventional emblematic/ contemplative method: after delineating an object or scene in its sensus literalis, she interpretively "moralizes" or "spiritualizes" the same for edification. This was a practice she had neatly outlined in the first of the "Meditations, Divine and Moral": There is no obiect that we see; no action that we doe; no good that we inioy; no evill that we feele, or fear, but we may make some spiritu[a]ll aduantage of all: and he that makes such improvment is wise, as well as pious. (48) Analyzing an array of such emblemata, the unspecified contemplator probes various related themes (biblical history, spiritual presumption, consciousness of mortality) alongside the blissful, trusting ignorance of natural creatures (trees, cricket, grasshopper, fish, birds). Despite an admitted inability to laud and magnify the Creator (as she had intended) and despite the ubiquitous horror, vicious arrogance, deliberate ignorance, and treacherous infidelity that characterize the human condition she surveys, along the way she herself experiences a meliorative resolution and an ultimate [End Page 32] gain in wisdom and hope. The poem concludes on a sanguine, albeit abrupt and mysterious, note for the Elect "whose name...

&amp;quot;To be thy Praise, / And be my salvation&amp;quot;: The Double Function of Praise in The Temple

“To be thy praise, / And be my salvation”:The Double Function of Praise in The Temple Margaret J. Oakes In her comprehensive study of Protestant poetics, Barbara Lewalski notes the forms and variety of George Herbert's poems of praise: Hymns were by definition joyful praises of God or thanksgivings to him: in Herbert this category covers the broad range from the elegant simplicity of the hymn portion of "Easter" to the lofty eloquence of "Providence." (300) Herbert's overall corpus of poetry reflects his obsession with praise: approximately forty-eight poems in the Bodleian MS. of The Temple, two additional from the Williams MS., and his two early sonnets to his mother either directly praise God or talk about the act or writing of praise. When Herbert engages in this type of poetic expression, however, these acts have a double function. Of course, Herbert makes use of praise as a way of honoring or thanking God. But he also intends it to be a means of creating a participatory role in his own salvation: his poems are responses from an individual sparked by the gift of grace. For Herbert, the recognition of one's own salvation establishes a duty to glorify God in return in whatever form, literary or otherwise, the Christian is able. Louis Martz comments that Herbert uses his art as "a means of partaking in the salvation offered by a transcendent power" ("Voices," 103). But Herbert is not only convinced that he must praise, he is obsessed with the proper method of doing so, taking up the subject time and time again in his poetry: Joseph Summers has noted that "One of the chief sources of the Christian's and the poet's 'miserie' was that he could not properly praise God" (106). Thus, it is also important to examine Herbert's concerns about the methods of praising that he attempts and the impediments he overcomes in order to worship the Lord in ways that he considers correct. The physical illness and pain that plagued Herbert throughout hislife distract him from his task, but these problems are exacerbated by [End Page 120] emotional issues such as a lack of confidence and motivation, and, on the opposite end of the spectrum, a concern over exhibiting too much pride in his poetic ability. These complications are what make Herbert's poetry more than just flaccid applause or naïve Sunday School rhymes: Herbert is fully and equally aware of the pitfalls of Christianity and the need to write good poetry. On this last point I depart from Summers, who claims that "the beauty of language, like the soul's, can live only if it is 'lost' to the proper object" (119). In The Temple, Herbert is very careful not to lose his mastery over beautiful language; rather, he knows that a confident use of one's abilities can assist the soul in finding its final place with God. Of course, a major sticking point for a post-Calvinist Protestant in contemplating salvation was the complex and evolving doctrine of predestination. Jean Calvin's notions of unconditional predestination had been interpreted narrowly by later Continental and English thinkers. Calvin's disciple Theodore Beza maintained that God "hathe determined from before all beginning with hym selfe, to create all thyngs in their tyme, for his glory, and namely men: whom he hath made after two sorts, cleane contrarie one to the other" (2.A.iii). English theologian William Perkins declared in 1590 that God "hath ordained all men to a certain and everlasting estate, that is either to salvation or condemnation, for his own glory" (186). But countering these views were theologians such as Jacobus Arminius: his growing rejection of hard-line doctrine in the Netherlands had been crystallized by 1610 into a set of articles which, while not retreating to the Pelagian and semi-Pelagian position that the human will rather than divine grace initiated the steps toward eternal salvation, stood firmly for the propositions that predestination was conditioned by God's foreknowledge of the individual's response to the offer of grace, and that a believer could both resist and fall from grace. Many of the theological and...

Spenser and the discourses of Reformation England

Spenser and the Discourses of Reformation is a wide-ranging exploration of the relationships among literature, religion, and politics in Renaissance England. Richard Mallette demonstrates how one of the great masterpieces of English literature, Edmund Spenser's Queene, reproduces, criticizes, parodies, and transforms the discourses of England during that remarkable political and literary era. According to Mallette, Faerie Queene not only represents Reformation values but also challenges, questions, and frequently undermines Protestant assumptions. Building upon recent scholarship, particularly new historicism, Protestant poetics, feminism, and gender theory, this ambitious study traces Faerie Queene's linkage of religion to political and social realms. Mallette's study expands traditional theological conceptions of Renaissance England, showing how the poem incorporates and transmutes religious discourses and thereby tests, appraises, and questions their avowals and assurances. The book's focus on religious discourses leads Mallette to examine how such matters as marriage, gender, the body, revenge, sexuality, and foreign policy were represented - in both traditional and subversive ways - in Spenser's influential masterpiece. A bold and finely argued contribution to our understanding of Reformation thought, and Renaissance literature and society, Mallette's study will add to the ongoing reassessment of England during this important period. Richard Mallette is a professor of English at Lake Forest College. He is the author of Spenser, Milton and Renaissance Pastoral.

Anne Bradstreet's “personal” protestant poetics

Bradstreet's adaptation in her works of a well-known and highly politicized Protestant aesthetics based on ut pictura poesis, most commonly identified in the visual arts, accounts for her treatment of historical subjects in her supposedly “public” elegies and poems and of her domestic life in the “personal” poems and prose works. In all of these works, but especially in her later posthumously published ones, her depiction of herself as a writing woman, her “simple” poetics, and her persistent focus on the transient aspects of human existence suggest an ideologically chosen enclosure in a domestic economy subsequent generations refine and redefine as a “woman's place.” But, Bradstreet's negation of self and subject, the negation of self as subject, is instead the referent for interpretation, for another reader's construction of a text to be read