Through a glass darkly : suffering, the sacred, and the sublime in literature and theory / edited by Holly Faith Nelson, Lynn R. Szabo, Jens Zimmermann.
Title
Through a glass darkly : suffering, the sacred, and the sublime in literature and theory / edited by Holly Faith Nelson, Lynn R. Szabo, Jens Zimmermann.
Publication
[Waterloo, Ont.] : Wilfrid Laurier University Press, c2010.
Suffering, the sacred, and the sublime are concepts that often surface in humanities research in an attempt to come to terms with what is challenging, troubling, or impossible to represent. These intersecting concepts are used to mediate the gap between the spoken and the unspeakable, between experience and language, between body and spirit, between the immanent and the transcendent, and between the human and the divine. The twenty-five essays in Through a Glass Darkly: Suffering, the Sacred, and the Sublime in Literature and Theory, written by international scholars working in the fields of literary criticism, philosophy, and history, address the ways in which literature and theory have engaged with these concepts and related concerns. The contributors analyze literary and theoretical texts from the medieval period to the postmodern age, from the works of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Donne, and Herbert to those of Endo Shusaku, Alice Munro, Annie Dillard, Emmanuel Levinas, and Slavoj Zizek. This book will be of particular interest to scholars of religion and literature, philosophy and literature, aesthetic theory, and trauma studies. --Book Jacket.
Includes bibliographical references (p. 401-428) and index.
Processing Action (note)
committed to retain
Contents
Trauma and transcendence : an introduction / Holly Faith Nelson -- The classical and Biblical inheritance. -- Sacred proposals and the spiritual sublime / David Lyle Jeffrey -- Medieval visions and dreams. -- "Loke in : how weet a wounde is heere!" : the wounds of Christ as a sacred space in English devotional literature / Eleanor McCullough -- Suffering in the service of Venus : the sacred, the sublime, and Chaucerian joy in the middle part of the Parliament of fowls / Norm Klassen -- Shakespearean horror. -- Listening to Lavinia : Emmanuel Levinas's saying and said in Titus Andronicus / Sean Lawrence -- Precious stories : the discursive economy in Shakespeare's Rape of Lucrece / Heather G.S. Johnson -- Metaphysical afflictions. -- The sacred pain of penitence : the theology of John Donne's Holy sonnets / David Anonby -- Bearing the cross : the Christian's response to suffering in Herbert's The temple / Daniel W. Doerksen -- The ethical romantic sublime. -- Horrific suffering, sacred terror, and sublime freedom in Helen Maria Williams's Peru / Natasha Duquette -- Joanna Baillie and the Christian gothic : reforming society through the sublime / Christine A. Colón -- Suffering and sacrament in the nineteenth century. -- Sacramental suffering and the waters of redemption and transformation in George Eliot's fiction / Constance M. Fulmer -- Christina Rossetti and the poetics of tractarian suffering / Esther T. Hu -- Suffering in word and in truth : seventeenth- and nineteenth century Quaker women's autobiography / Robynne Rogers Healey -- Sacred Modernism(s). -- Sacramental imagination : eucharists of the ordinary universe in the works of Joyce, Proust, and Woolf / Richard Kearney -- The Via Negativa in Forster's A passage to India / George Piggford -- The fellowship of suffering and hope in fantasy literature. -- Consolation in un/certainty : the sacred spaces of suffering in the children's fantasy literature of George Macdonald, C.S. Lewis, and Madeleine L'Engle / Monika B. Hilder -- The messiah of history : the search of synchronicity in Miller's A canticle for Leibowitz / Deanna T. Smid -- Violation and redemption in Canadian fiction. -- Suffering and the sacred : Hugh Hood's The new age/Le nouveau siècle / Barbara Pell -- Fictional violations in Alice Munro's narratives / John C. Van Rys -- The American sublime. -- Thomas Merton and the aesthetics of the sublime : "a beautiful terror" / Lynn R. Szabo -- Belated beloved : time, trauma, and the sublime in Toni Morrison's Beloved / Steve Vine -- Annie Dillard on holy ground : the artist as nun in the postmodern sublime / Deborah C. Bowen -- Japanese (re)visioning of the suffering Christ. -- Passion plays by proxy : the Paschal face as interculturality in the works of Endō Shūsaku and Mishima Yukio / Sean Somers -- Postmodern aesthetics and beyond. -- Testifying to the infinity of the Other : the sacred and ethical dimensions of secondary witnessing in Anne Karpf's The war after / Bettina Stumm -- Sacred space and the fellowship of suffering in the postmodern sublime / Richard J. Lane -- Suffering divine things : cruciform reasoning or incarnational hermeneutics / Jens Zimmermann.