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 William Franke
Professor of Comparative Literature, Italian, and Religious Studies
William Franke trained in philosophy and theology at Williams College and Oxford University and in comparative literature at UC Berkeley and at Stanford (Ph.D. 1991). He is Professor of Comparative Literature, Italian, and Religious Studies, at Vanderbilt University (USA) and Professor of Philosophy and Religions and the University of Macao (China, SAR). My Intellectual Project
My early and continuing training in philosophy and theology forms the matrix for my work in the criticism and theory of literature. I concentrate on questions of how to read poetry as a disclosure of truth, a way of relating to the real, and even as “revelation” in a religious sense. Dante has been a key author for me ever since my doctoral dissertation, the fulcrum for readings of poetry as apocalypse in literature ranging from the Bible and Homer through German Romantics, Emily Dickinson, and French symbolists to James Joyce and contemporary poets like Paul Celan, Edmond Jabès, Samuel Beckett, and Wallace Stevens. My readings of poets are at the same time attempts to develop philosophical theories of how language performs in the invention of worlds and realities, including other worlds and surrealities. Language can even go beyond the world, or evoke a dimension that revokes the world altogether, and so become apocalyptic. I focus on this penchant of poetic language in my monograph, Poetry and Apocalypse: Theological Disclosures of Poetic Language (Stanford University Press, 2009). My first book, Dante’s Interpretive Journey (University of Chicago Press, 1996) proposes a poetic and theological philosophy of interpretation. It places the theological hermeneutics of Dante’s poem into dialogue with modern philosophical hermeneutics as developed particularly by Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer. It is, in fact, "A Hermeneutical Dialogue between the Comedy and Modern Thought"—as declared by the original sub-title, which was lost in the process preceding publication. It thereby brings to focus the existential and theological structures of interpretation by which our lives in language are constructed in poetic ways that Dante's Divine Comedy eminently illustrates. Dante's poem enacts a comprehensive interpretation of the world as poetically invented within a theological horizon and projected upon the existence of its readers. Dante's direct address to his readers summons them to repeat and poetically re-make his experience of conversion in their own acts of interpretation: the address thereby becomes the locus of an original event of truth and potentially divinity in readers' lives. The poem's enactment through its reader of a disclosure of the world in its final, eschatological meaning effectively critiques modern theories of interpretation in their closure to poetic making as potentially an event of suprahistorical truth. Such reflection opens original insights into the nature of interpretation, especially insights regarding its existential grounding in and openness to transcendence of the sort realized in incarnate religious revelation. In Dante, and through him in every reader or interpreter, the personal, passionate existence of the historical individual becomes intrinsic to theological revelation--to an apocalyptic disclosure of the ultimate significance of human life.
This initial project, through fairly exhaustive exploration of its central concern, led me to the limits of the concept of interpretation. Consequently, much of my subsequent work has been concerned with the question of what resists all efforts of interpretation and therefore of saying—or, in other words, with the "beyond" of language. This topic of "ineffability" becomes arguably Dante's main preoccupation in his final work, the Paradiso, and I realized that to complete my speculative engagement with the Divine Comedy, I required another theoretical paradigm beyond hermeneutics, beyond philosophies of interpretation. To this end, I undertook to investigate the problem of ineffability in ancient and medieval tradition but also in modern thought and culture generally, since we approach our past always only in and through our present.
On this topic, I composed a two-volume anthology-cum-history-and-theory entitled: On What Cannot Be Said: Apophatic Discourses in Philosophy, Religion, Literature and the Arts (vol. 1: Classical Formulations; vol. 2: Modern and Contemporary Transformations). It was published in 2007 by the University of Notre Dame Press. The prefaces present a theoretical framework defining apophasis as a genre (Volume 1) and as a mode (Volume 2) of discourse. The introductions propose a historical outline of apophasis as the pivot for an alternative history of Western thought, the history of what was never written nor explicitly said and yet conditioned and impinged on, from beyond the threshold of language, all discourse and theory in this intellectual tradition. Twenty-seven principle authors and their seminal texts are introduced in each volume. The series begins from Plato and the Neoplatonic commentaries on the Parmenides and moves through medieval and baroque mysticisms, which are compared to Kabbalah and Sufi mysticism, in Volume 1. Volume 2 treats poets of the unsayable from Hölderlin and Dickinson through Rilke and Celan, along with philosophers of the limits of language, including Wittgenstein, Rosenzweig, Weil, Levinas, Derrida, and Marion. It also considers theories by Schoenberg, Jankélévitch, Adorno, and Cage of how music verges upon silence, and it sounds negative discourses of architecture and painting as conceived by Malevich, Kandinsky, and van der Rohe, among others. I pursue the limits of language and interpretation further, marking their tension with the exigencies of poetic disclosure and religious revelation, in my next published monograph. Poetry and Apocalypse: Theological Disclosures of Poetic Language offers an interdisciplinary synthesis, combining a philosophical theory of dialogue (worked out in dialogue with the theory of Jürgen Habermas); a literary-critical interpretation of poetic language in the apocalyptic tradition; and a negative theology that renews certain fundamental impulses and insights of revealed religion. It is concerned with finding the premises for dialogue between cultures, especially between religious fundamentalisms, like the Islamic, and modern Western secularism. The common ground is found precisely in connection with the unsayable, where no party to the discussion can impose its own terms. The thesis is that dialogue in general, in order to be genuinely open, needs to be able to open up to such a possibility as religious apocalypse in ways that can be understood best through the experience of poetic language. Poetic language in a tradition traced from the Bible through Dante, Milton, and Blake to Finnegans Wake enacts a breaking down of all humanly manipulated systems of communication in an apocalyptic opening to what is absolute and beyond saying. The book interprets the Christian epic and prophetic tradition as a secularization of religious revelation that nevertheless preserves an understanding of the essentially apocalyptic character of truth and its disclosure in history. The usually neglected negative theology that underwrites this apocalyptic tradition provides the key to a radically new and open understanding of apocalypse as inextricably religious and poetic at the same time. One of the great challenges of scholarship for me is to intervene in a diversity of fields. My goal has been to become conversant with the specific terms of different areas of study—different periods and literatures, languages and disciplines—and then to make connections between them on the basis of the concerns they share in common as reflected upon philosophically in my own terms. Thanks to this method, the mosaic of my scholarly writings presents a wide range of materials framed by a general philosophy of the humanities. This philosophical reflection on literature and the humanities is what my directly theoretical writings aim to develop more explicitly. I sketch an epistemology of knowledge in the humanities in "The Humanities as Involved Knowing"—the Introduction to my book manuscript, The Revelation of Imagination: From the Bible and Homer through Virgil and Augustine to Dante. The five ensuing chapters then elucidate the special nature of this type of knowledge as personal, relational, contextual, and temporal-historical in a sequence of readings of founding texts of Western civilization. I examine exactly how each of these humanities texs opens upon a religious dimension of transcendence. The underlying concern, as in of all of my writings in one way or another, is to demonstrate the determining role of poetic creation in religious revelation. I aim thereby to render intelligible the authenticity of such revelation.
My Publications: Critical and Theoretical
My record of publications is unusual for its variety, particularly its character as simultaneously philosophical, theological, and critical, as well as for the wide spectrum of literature that it treats from different periods and traditions and languages. My work includes scholarly contributions to the interpretation of Greek and Roman classics and the Bible, as well as studies in medieval and Renaissance and modern literatures in Italian, French, German, Spanish, and English. Notwithstanding the range of the material, there is in all this speculative as well as scholarly writing a constant focus on philosophical questions concerning the nature of poetic language as disclosure of truth and more specifically as religious revelation. All the essays work at the level of contributions to their respective fields of scholarship but also as further developments of a distinctive philosophical outlook on language, literature, and culture. The major theses of this embryonic philosophy of literature and the humanities—at the same time a theology of poetic language and imagination—reappear in different forms as they emerge from apparently disparate areas of research in each essay. Various aspects of this theoretical outlook are developed in the speculative essays in philosophical theology or literary theory more freely and independently than in the interpretive essays focused on specific authors.
Virtually all of my writings are theoretical and philosophical; all refer to literature and are relevant to religion as well. Nevertheless, it may be useful to break them down according to their emphasis on one or another of these areas. Such a taxonomy helps to suggest their coherence as a body of writings with differentiated organs and functions. Essays in Literary Theory
"Involved Knowing: Epistemological Reflections on the Humanities"
The European Legacy: Towards New Paradigms 16/4 (2011): 449-69 “The Canon Question and the Value of Theory: Towards a New (Non-) Concept of Universality” The Canonical Debate Today. Crossing Disciplinary and Cultural Boundaries, eds. Liviu Papadima, David Damrosch, and Theo D’haen (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2011), pp. 55-71. "Apophatic Paths: Modern and Contemporary Poetics and Aesthetics of Nothing" Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 17/3 (2012): 7-18 “The Ethical Posture of Post-Colonial Discourse in Said and in Gandhi” Journal of Contemporary Thought 25 (Summer, 2007): 5-24
“Varieties and Valences of Unsayability in Literature" Philosophy and Literature 29/2 (2005): 489-497 “Metaphor and the Making of Sense: The Contemporary Metaphor Renaissance”
Philosophy and Rhetoric 33/2 (2000): 137-154.
“Psychoanalysis as a Hermeneutics of the Subject: Freud, Ricoeur, Lacan”
Dialogue: The Canadian Philosophical Review 38 (1998): 65-81
Essays in Philosophical Theology and Philosophy of Religion“William Franke on Post-Structuralist Interpretation”
In Italo Calvino: Modern Critical Views, ed. Harold Bloom (Philadelphia: Chelsea, 2001), pp. 28-30. [Reprint from “The Deconstructive Anti-Logic of Italo Calvino’s Le città invisibili,” Italian Quarterly 30 (1989): 31-41]. “The Origin of Philosophy in Theological Critique of Idolatry and its Consummation in Negative Theological Critique of Conceptual Idolatry,” Hermeneutica (forthcoming) “Negative Theology,” The Enclopedia of Sciences and Religions (forthcoming) “The Paramount Importance of What Cannot Be Said in Public Theological Discourse” Contextuality and Intercontextuality in Public Theology, eds. Heinrich Bedford-Strohm, Dirkie Smit, James Haire, and Ruedi von Sinner (Berlin: LIT-Verlag, 2012), series on “Theology in the Public Square” forthcoming "Equivocations of Metaphyiscs: A Debate with Christian Moevs' The Metaphysics of Dante's Commedia" Philosophy and Theology 20/1-2 (2009): 29-52 "Existentialism: An Atheistic or a Christian Philosophy?" In Phenomenology and Existentialism in the Twentieth Century ed. A.-T. Tymeniejka, chapter 24 Annalecta Husserliana 103 (2009): 369-92 “The Coincidence of Reason and Revelation in Communicative Openness:
A Critical Negative Theology of Dialogue” Journal of Religion 88/3 (2008): 365-392 “Eine kritische Negative Theologie des Dialogs: Die Koinzidenz der Vernunft und der Offenbarung in kommunikativen Offenheit“ [ “A Critical Negative Theology of Dialogue: The Coincidence of Reason and Revelation in Communicative Openness”] trans. by Michael Sonntag Salzburger Theologishe Zeitschrift 11 (2007): 217-49 “The Deaths of God in Hegel and Nietzsche and the Crisis of Values
in Secular Modernity and Post-Secular Postmodernity”
Religion and the Arts 11/2 (2007): 214-41
"Praising the Unsayable: An Apophatic Defense of Metaphysics
Based on the Neoplatonic Parmenides Commentaries"
Epoché: Journal for the History of Philosophy 11/1 (2006): 143-173.
"Apophasis and the Turn of Philosophy to Religion:
From Neoplatonic Negative Theology to Postmodern Negation of Theology," International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion 60 (2006): 61-73 Special issue of invited contributions on contemporary Continental Philosophy of Religion "Franz Rosenzweig and the Emergence of a Post-Secular Philosophy of the Unsayable"
International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion 58/3 (2005): 161-180. “A Philosophy of the Unsayable: Apophasis and the Experience of Truth and Totality”
In Imaginatio Creatrix, ed. A.-T. Tymieniecka,
Analecta Husserliana LXXXIII (2004): 65-83. “Apocalypse and the Breaking-Open of Dialogue: A Negatively Theological Perspective”
International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion 47 (2000): 65-86
PhilPapers: Online Research in Philosophy Theoretical Essays in Literature and Religion “Altizer’s Apocalyptic Theology: The Birth of Christian Epic out of the Death of God”
In Tools of the Sacred, Techniques of the Secular: Awakening, Epiphany, Apocalypse and Doubt in Contemporary English-Language Verse ed. Franca Bellarsi, Comparative Poetics Series/P.I.E. (Netherlands: Peter Lang, 2012) forthcoming “Beyond the Limits of Reason Alone: A Critical Approach to the Religious Inspiration of Literature” Position statement for forum of invited contributions to Special Issue on the discipline of Religion and Literature: Religion and Literature 41/2 (2009): 69-78 “Poetic Language, Apocalypse,
and the Premises for Dialogue between a Secular West and Radical Islam” In Reconstructing Realities: Occident-Orient Engagements,
eds. Ganakumaran Subramaniam, Shanthini Pillai and Hafriza Burhanudeen (Kuala Lumpur: Pearson Malaysia, 2007), pp. 41-52 “Primordial Sacrifice, Typology, and the Theological Vocation of Literature: Extending Gian Balsamo’s Interpretation of Joyce and Christian Epic”
Literature and Theology 20/3 (2006): 251-268
“Literature as Liturgy and the Interpretive Revolution of Literary Criticism” Preface to Gian Balsamo, Scriptural Poetics in Finnegans Wake
(Lewisburg, New York: Edwin Mellin Press, 2002), pp. v-xiii
Philosophical and Theological Essays on Modern Literature
"'The Missing All': Emily Dickinson's Apophatic Poetics" Christianity and Literature 58/1 (2008): 61-80 “Edmond Jabès, or the Endless Self-Emptying of Language in the Name of God” Literature and Theology (2007): 1-16
“Le Nom de Dieu comme vanité du langage au fond de tout mot selon Edmond Jabès,” ["The Name of God as the Vanity of Language in the Heart of Every Word"], trans. by Martine Prieto and Geoffrey Obin, Edmond Jabès, l'éclosion des énigmes, pp. 249-260, Eds. Daniel Lançon and Catherine Mayaux (Vincennes: Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, 2008) “James Joyce and the Bible”
In Blackwell’s Companion to the Bible in English Literature,
eds. Christopher Rowland, Christine Joynes, Rebecca Lemon, Emma Masson, Jonathan Roberts
(Oxford: Blackwells, 2008), pp. 642-53.
“The Dialectical Logic of Yeats’s Byzantium Poems”
Poetry Criticism,vol. 51, ed. Carol Ullman (Kennedale, TX: Gale Group, 2004)
Reprinted from Yeats-Eliot Review 15, no. 3: 23-32
"The Linguistic Turning of the Symbol: Baudelaire and his French Symbolist Heirs."
In Baudelaire and the Poetics of Modernity.
In Honor of Claude Pichois. Ed. Patricia Ward. (Nashviille: Vanderbilt University Press, 2000), pp. 28-40.
“The Dialectical Logic of Yeats’s Byzantium Poems”
Yeats-Eliot Review 15, no. 3 (Summer 1998): 23-32
“In the Interstices between Symbol and Allegory: Montale’s Figurative Mode”
Comparative Literature Studies 31/4 (1994): 370-89
“Poetics and Apocalypse in Manzoni’s Interpretation of History”
Esperienze letterarie Anno XVIII - n. 4 (1993): 17-38
“The Logic of Infinity: European Romanticism and the Question of Giacomo Leopardi”
Comparatio: Revue Internationale de Littérature Comparée 1 (1990): 69-82
“The Deconstructive Anti-Logic of Italo Calvino’s Le città invisibili”
Italian Quarterly 30 (1989): 31-41
Philosophical and Theological Essays on Ancient Literature
“Homer’s Musings and the Divine Muse: Epic Song as Invention and Revelation" Religion and Literature 43/3 (2011): 1-29 “On the Poetic Truth that is Higher than History:
Porphyry and the Philosophical Interpretation of Literature” International Philosophical Quarterly 50/4 (2010): 415-430 “Virgil, History, and Prophecy” Philosophy and Literature 29 (2005): 73-88
“On Doing the Truth in Time: The Aeneid’s Invention of Poetic Prophecy” Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics 19/1 (2011): 111-2 “Gospel as Personal Knowing: Theological Reflections on not Just a Literary Genre” Theology Today 68/4 (2011): 413-23 “Prophecy as a Genre of Revelation: Synergisms of Inspiration and Imagination in the Book of Isaiah” Theology 114/5 (2011): 340-52 “The Exodus Epic: Universalization of History Through Ritual”
Universality and History: The Foundations of Core, eds. Don Thompson, Darrel Colson, and J.
Scott Lee (Lanham-New York-Oxford: University Press of America, 2002), pp. 59-70
“Damascius. Of the Ineffable: Aporetics of the Notion of an Absolute Principle”
Arion A Journal of Humanities and the Classics 12/1 Spring/Summer 2004: 111-31.
(Introduction with original translation from the Greek of De principiis, Part I, cc 3-8).
Philosophical and Theological Essays
on Renaissance and Medieval Literature
“Blind Prophecy: Milton’s Figurative Mode in Paradise Lost”
In Through A Glass Darkly: Essays in the Religious Imagination, pp. 87-103,
ed. John Hawley (New York: Fordham University Press, 1996).
“Hermeneutic Catastrophe in Racine: The Epistemological Predicament of 17th Century Tragedy”
Romanische Forschungen 105 (1993): 315-31
“Prophecy Eclipsed: Hamlet as a Tragedy of Knowledge”
Core Texts in Conversation, eds. Jane Kelley Rodeheffer, David Sokolowski, and J. Scott Lee
(Lanham-New York-Oxford: University Press of America, 2000), pp. 149-154.
“‘Enditynges of Worldly Vanitees’: Truth and Poetry in Chaucer as Compared with Dante”
The Chaucer Review 87, no. 1 (1999): 87-106
Philosophical and Theological Essays on Dante “Dante’s Hermeneutic Rite of Passage: Inferno IX” Classical and Medieval Literary Criticism on Dante (Gale/Cengage Learning, 2012) Reprinted from Dante’s Interpretive Journey, pp. 82-118 "The Place of the Proper Name in the Topographies of the Paradiso"' The Italianist, forthcoming “Dante’s Hermeneutic Complicity in Violence and Fraud in Inferno IX-XVII,”
University of Toronto Quarterly, forthcoming ”Paradoxical Prophecy: Dante’s Strategy of Self-Subversion in the Inferno” Italica, forthcoming "The Death and Damnation of Poetry in Inferno XXXI-XXXIV: Ugolino and Narrative as an Instrument of Revenge," Comparative Literature 59/3 (2007): 209-227
"The Rhetorical-Theological Presence of Romans in Dante: A Comparison of Methods in Philosophical Perspective Ïn Medieval Readings of Romans, eds. William S. Campbell, Peter S. Hawkins, Brenda Dean Schildgen (New York: T & T Clark International, 2007), pp. 142-52 "Scripture as Theophany in Dante's Paradiso"
Religion and Literature Spring 2007 (The Annual Religion and Literature Lecture at University of Notre Dame for 2006) “Dante and Modern Hermeneutic Thought” Lectura Dantis: A Forum for Dante Research and Interpretation 12 (1993): 34-52
“Resurrected Tradition and Revealed Truth: Dante’s Statius”
Quaderni d’italianistica 15/1-2 (1994): 7-34
“Dante’s Hermeneutic Rite of Passage: Inferno IX”
Religion and Literature 26/2 (1994): 1-26
”Dante and the Poetics of Religious Revelation”
Symploke: A Journal for the Intermingling of Literary, Cultural and Theoretical Scholarship
2/2 (1994): 103-116
“Dante’s Address to the Reader and its Ontological Significance”
Modern Language Notes 109 (1994): 117-127
“Reader’s Application and the Moment of Truth”
In Dante: Contemporary Perspectives, pp. 59-80,
ed. Amilcare Iannucci, University of Toronto Press, 1996.
[revised reprint of “Dante and Modern Hermeneutic Thought,”
Lectura Dantis: A Forum for Dante Research and Interpretation 12 (1993): 34-52].
“Dante’s Address to the Reader en face Derrida’s Critique of Ontology”
Annalecta Husserliana LXIX (2000): 119-131.
"Figuralism," “Albert the Great,” “Constantine,” “Israel," “William II of Sicily,”
The Dante Encyclopedia (New York-London: Garland Publishing, 2000),
pp. 376-79, 11, 216-17, 524-525, 885-86.
“Il significato teologico del paesaggio di san Benedetto nel Paradiso di Dante”
Lo Speco CVII, no. 4 (2002): 80-82
“Truth and Interpretation in the Divine Comedy”
In Dante: Modern Critical Views, ed. Harold Bloom (Philadelphia: Chelsea, 2004), pp. 287-305
(excerpt reprinted from Dante’s Interpretive Journey, pp. 5-23)
“The Interpretive Journey and the Allegory of Reading:
Introduction to the Inferno as a Humanities Text”
Uniting the Liberal Arts: Core and Context,
ed. Bainard Cowen and J. Scott Lee
(Lanham-New York-Oxford: University Press of America, 2002), pp 75-82 “Dante, Alighieri,” “Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite,” and “Petrarch, Francesco.” Cambridge Dictionary of Christianity, ed. Daniel Patte (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 2010) CLASSIFICATION BY SUBJECT OF PUBLISHED ESSAYS
"Involved Knowing: Epistemological Reflections on the Humanities," The European Legacy: Towards New Paradigms 16/4 (2011): 449-69
“On the Poetic Truth that is Higher than History: Porphyry and the Philosophical Interpretation of Literature,” International Philosophical Quarterly 50/4 (2010): 415-430 “Beyond the Limits of Reason Alone: A Critical Approach to the Religious Inspiration of Literature.” Position statement for forum of invited contributions to Special Issue on the discipline of Religion and Literature: Religion and Literature 41/2 (2009): 69-78
“Augustine’s Confessions and the Transcendental Ground of Consciousness: “The Interpretive Journey and the Allegory of Reading: Introduction to the Inferno as a Humanities Text,” Uniting the Liberal Arts: Core and Context, ed. Bainard Cowen and J. Scott Lee (Lanham-New York-Oxford: University Press of America, 2002), pp 75-82
Philosophical Theology and Philosophy of Religion
“The Deaths of God in Hegel and Nietzsche and the Crisis of Values in Secular Modernity and Post-Secular Postmodernity,” Religion and the Arts 11/2 (2007): 214-41
in Phenomenology and Existentialism in the Twentieth Century, ed. A.-T. Tymeniejka, chapter 24, Annalecta Husserliana 103 (2009): 369-92
"Equivocations of Metaphysics: Apophatic Philosophy and Theology
"Praising the Unsayable: An Apophatic Defense of Metaphysics Based on the Neoplatonic Parmenides Commentaries," Epoché: Journal for the History of Philosophy 11/1 (2006): 143-173
“Unsayability and the Promise of Salvation: Apophatics, Literary Representation, and the World to Come,” Ende oder Umbau einer Erlösungsreligion? eds. Günther Thomas and Markus Höfner, Religion und Aufklärung series (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013) (forthcoming)
"Apophasis and the Turn of Philosophy to Religion: From Neoplatonic Negative Theology to Postmodern Negation of Theology," International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion 60 (2006): 61-73 (special issue of invited contributions on contemporary Continental Philosophy of Religion)
"Franz Rosenzweig and the Emergence of a Post-Secular Philosophy of the Unsayable"
“A Philosophy of the Unsayable: Apophasis and the Experience of Truth and Totality,”
“Apocalypse and the Breaking-Open of Dialogue: A Negatively Theological Perspective,” International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion 47 (2000): 65-86
“The Coincidence of Reason and Revelation in Communicative Openness:
Die Koinzidenz der Vernunft und der Offenbarung in kommunikativen Offenheit” [“A Critical Negative
“The Origin of Philosophy in Theological Critique of Idolatry and its Consummation Hermeneutica, Nuova serie (2012): 315-32
“Negative Theology,” The Enclopedia of Sciences and Religions, eds. Anne Runehov, Lluis Oviedo (Dordrecht: Springer, 2013). Co-authored with Chance Woods
“The Paramount Importance of What Cannot Be Said in Public Theological Discourse”
“Damascius. Of the Ineffable: Aporetics of the Notion of an Absolute Principle,” Apophatic Aesthetic Theory
Philosophy and Literature 29/2 (2005): 489-497 Literary Theory: Post-structuralist, Hermeneutic, Psychoanalytical, Postcolonial
“William Franke on Post-Structuralist Interpretation,” in Italo Calvino: Modern Critical Views, ed. Harold Bloom (Philadelphia: Chelsea, 2001), pp. 28-30. [Reprint from “The Deconstructive Anti-Logic of Italo Calvino’s Le città invisibili,” Italian Quarterly 30 (1989): 31-41]
“Symbol and Allegory,” The Routledge Companion to Philosophical Hermeneutics, Chapter 30, eds. Jeff Malpas and Hans-Helmuth Gander (forthcoming)
“Psychoanalysis as a Hermeneutics of the Subject: Freud, Ricoeur, Lacan,” Dialogue: The Canadian Philosophical Review 38 (1998): 65-81
“The Ethical Posture of Post-Colonial Discourse in Said and in Gandhi,” Journal of Contemporary Thought 25 (Summer, 2007): 5-24
Cultural Theory: Canon Question, Universalism, Identity Theory, Trauma
“The Canon Question and the Value of Theory: Towards a New (Non-) Concept of Universality,” in The Canonical Debate Today. Crossing Disciplinary and Cultural Boundaries, eds. Liviu Papadima, David Damrosch, and Theo D’haen “The New Apophatic Universalism: Deconstructive Critical Theories and Open Togetherness in the European Tradition,” The Journal of European Studies (2014) (forthcoming) “Saint Paul Among the Theorists: A Genealogy of the New Universalism,” Dante’s God-Trauma as Levinasian Relation to the Other,” Routledge Companion to Literature and Trauma, ed. David Miller (forthcoming) Literary Theory 2: Figurative Rhetorics “Metaphor and the Making of Sense: The Contemporary Metaphor Renaissance,”
“In the Interstices between Symbol and Allegory: Montale’s Figurative Mode,” Comparative Literature Studies 31/4 (1994): 370-89
"Figuralism," “Albert the Great,” “Constantine,” “Israel," “William II of Sicily,” The Dante Encyclopedia (New York-London: Garland Publishing, 2000), pp. 376-79, 11, 216-17, 524-525, 885-86.
“The Rhetorical-Theological Presence of Romans in Dante: Philosophical and Theological Essays Moving from Dante
"The Place of the Proper Name in the Topographies of the Paradiso,"' Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies 87/4 (2012): 1089-1124
“Dante’s New Life and the New Testament: An Essay on the Hermeneutics of Revelation,”
“Dante’s Hermeneutic Complicity in Violence and Fraud in Inferno IX-XVII,”
"Dante's Inferno as Poetic Revelation of Prophetic Truth," Philosophy and Literature 33/2 (2009): 252-266 Comparative Literature 59/3 (2007): 209-227 A Comparison of Methods in Philosophical Perspective,” in Medieval Readings of Romans, eds. William S. Campbell, Peter S. Hawkins, Brenda Dean Schildgen (New York: T & T Clark International, 2007), pp. 142-52
"Scripture as Theophany in Dante's Paradiso," Religion and Literature 39/2 (Spring 2007): 1-32 Lectura Dantis: A Forum for Dante Research and Interpretation 12 (1993): 34-52
”Dante and the Poetics of Religious Revelation,” Symploke:
“Dante’s Address to the Reader and its Ontological Significance,” Modern Language Notes 109 (1994): 117-127
“Reader’s Application and the Moment of Truth,” in Dante: Contemporary Perspectives, pp. 59-80,ed. Amilcare Iannucci, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996 [revised reprint of “Dante and Modern Hermeneutic Thought,” Lectura Dantis: A Forum for Dante Research and Interpretation 12 (1993): 34-52].
“Dante’s Address to the Reader en face Derrida’s Critique of Ontology,” Annalecta Husserliana LXIX (2000): 119-131.
"Figuralism," “Albert the Great,” “Constantine,” “Israel," “William II of Sicily,” The Dante Encyclopedia (New York-London: Garland Publishing, 2000),
“Il significato teologico del paesaggio di san Benedetto nel Paradiso di Dante,” Lo Speco CVII, no. 4 (2002): 80-82
“Truth and Interpretation in the Divine Comedy” in Dante: Modern Critical Views, ed. Harold Bloom (Philadelphia: Chelsea, 2004), pp. 287-305 (excerpt reprinted from Dante’s Interpretive Journey, pp. 5-23)
Interpretive Essays on: Dante
“Dante’s Hermeneutic Rite of Passage: Inferno IX,” Classical and Medieval Literary Criticism on Dante (Gale/Cengage Learning, 2012) (Reprinted from Dante’s Interpretive Journey, pp. 82-118)
“Paradoxical Prophecy: Dante’s Strategy of Self-Subversion in the Inferno,” Italica, 90: 3 (2013): 343-64
"The Death and Damnation of Poetry in Inferno XXXI-XXXIV: Ugolino and Narrative as an Instrument of Revenge," Romance Studies 28/1 (2010): 27-35
“Resurrected Tradition and Revealed Truth: Dante’s Statius” Quaderni d’italianistica 15/1-2 (1994): 7-34 Bible Literature
“Gospel as Personal Knowing: Theological Reflections on not Just a Literary Genre”
“Prophecy as a Genre of Revelation: Synergisms of Inspiration and Imagination in the Book of Isaiah,” Theology 114/5 (2011): 340-52 “The Exodus Epic: Universalization of History through Ritual,” Universality and History: The Foundations of Core, eds. Don Thompson, Darrel Colson, and J. Scott Lee (Lanham-New York-Oxford: University Press of America, 2002), pp. 59-70 Ancient Greek and Roman Literature “Homer’s Musings and the Divine Muse: Epic Song as Invention and Revelation"
“The Secondariness of Virgilian Epic and its Unprecedented Originality,” College Literature: A Journal of Critical Literary Studies 40/1 (2013): 11-31 Medieval and Renaissance Literature
“‘Enditynges of Worldly Vanitees’: Truth and Poetry in Chaucer as Compared with Dante” The Chaucer Review 87, no. 1 (1999): 87-106
“Blind Prophecy: Milton’s Figurative Mode in Paradise Lost,” in Through A Glass Darkly: Essays in the Religious Imagination, pp. 87-103, ed. John Hawley (New York: Fordham University Press, 1996)
“Hermeneutic Catastrophe in Racine: The Epistemological Predicament of 17th Century Tragedy,” Romanische Forschungen 105 (1993): 315-31
“Prophecy Eclipsed: Hamlet as a Tragedy of Knowledge,” in Core Texts in Conversation, eds. Jane Kelley Rodeheffer, David Sokolowski, and J. Scott Lee (Lanham-New York-Oxford: University Press of America, 2000), pp. 149-154
“Il significato teologico del paesaggio di san Benedetto nel Paradiso di Dante” Lo Speco CVII, no. 4 (2002): 80-82 “Dante, Alighieri,” “Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite,” and “Petrarch, Francesco.” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 2010) Romantic to Symbolist Literature
“The Logic of Infinity: European Romanticism and the Question of Giacomo Leopardi” Comparatio: Revue Internationale de Littérature Comparée 1 (1990): 69-82 “Poetics and Apocalypse in Manzoni’s Interpretation of History,” Esperienze letterarie Anno XVIII - n. 4 (1993): 17-38
"'The Missing All': Emily Dickinson's Apophatic Poetics," Christianity and Literature 58/1 (2008): 61-80
"The Linguistic Turning of the Symbol: Baudelaire and his French Symbolist Heirs," in Baudelaire and the Poetics of Modernity, in Honor of Claude Pichois, ed. Patricia Ward (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2000), pp. 28-40. Modern (20th Century) Literature
“Edmond Jabès, or the Endless Self-Emptying of Language in the Name of God,” Literature and Theology (2007): 1-16
“Le Nom de Dieu comme vanité du langage au fond de tout mot selon Edmond Jabès,” trans. Martine Prieto and Geoffrey Obin, Edmond Jabès, l'éclosion des énigmes, pp. 249-260, Eds. Daniel Lançon and Catherine Mayaux (Vincennes: Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, 2008)
“James Joyce and the Bible,” in Blackwell’s Companion to the Bible in English Literature, eds. Christopher Rowland, Christine Joynes, Rebecca Lemon, Emma Masson, Jonathan Roberts (Oxford: Blackwells, 2008), pp. 642-53
“The Dialectical Logic of Yeats’s Byzantium Poems” Poetry Criticism, vol. 51, ed. Carol Ullman (Kennedale, TX: Gale Group, 2004) Reprinted from Yeats-Eliot Review 15, no. 3: 23-32
“The Dialectical Logic of Yeats’s Byzantium Poems,”
“The Deconstructive Anti-Logic of Italo Calvino’s Le città invisibili,” Italian Quarterly 30 (1989): 31-41
“Poetics of Silence in the Post-Holocaust Poetry of Paul Celan,” Journal of Literature and Trauma Studies, vol. 2, issue 3 (forthcoming)
Book Manuscripts
Several further book projects exist in manuscript form as works-in-progress. Certain parts of each have appeared already in periodical literature. Five further books in particular are part of the overall design of a poetics of revelation and a philosophy of the humanities worked out in continual dialogue with a variety of theoretical paradigms among those most influential on the critical scene today.
[The Veil of Eternity: Language and Transcendence in Dante’s Paradiso]
First, there is another book on Dante, the sequel to Dante’s Interpretive Journey, which turned out to be based on interpretation of passages primarily from the Inferno and the Purgatorio. The hermeneutic paradigm developed in that book works in the most straightforward way in these segments of the poem. For the Paradiso a substantially different theoretical paradigm is called for because Dante runs up against the limits of language and interpretation. He experiences the break-down of interpretation and ventures into the "beyond" of language. The topos of "ineffability" and a negative theology and corresponding negative poetics, decisively qualifying and delimiting the poetics of revelation, become key to an adequate theoretical enframing of this culminating portion of the Divine Comedy. Accordingly, my central work on Dante (apart from other ad hoc contributions) is still in progress and will be complete only with this volume.
[A Philosophy of the Unsayable]
This manuscript proposes an original philosophy pivoting on analysis of the limits of language and explains why the encounter with what exceeds speech has become the crucial philosophical issue of our time. It offers also readings of literary texts, particularly the poetry of Paul Celan and Edmond Jabès, in which the philosophical principles worked out on a theoretical plane in the central essay are illustrated and applied. Whereas the anthology On What Cannot Be Said, in its extensive introductions, both general and specific, writes the history of traditions revolving around the problem of unsayability, the present manuscript focuses on my own explicit theory of unsayability, of the limits and the beyond of language, informed by long-standing conversation with major representatives of thinking on this issue throughout Western tradition.
The work thus sketches a distinctive philosophical outlook that emerges irrepressibly from the peculiar predicament of philosophy today. It interprets what are widespread intimations of thinking in the current milieu of critical reflection across disciplines in the arts and sciences and beyond into technical and professional fields and culture generally. We are in an age where discourse becomes acutely conscious of its intrinsic limits and is dominated by what it cannot say. Especially the last two centuries have seen new and radical currents of thinking about the limits of language and what may or may not lie beyond them. This thinking is rooted, however, in millenary discourses of mysticism and negative theology that can be traced back all the way to the origins of Western tradition. A kind of perennial counter-philosophy to the philosophy of Logos has resisted its claims all through history.
[The Revelation of Imagination:
From Homer and the Bible through Virgil and Augustine to Dante]
The humanities represent a special kind of knowledge involving interpretation and judgment that is vital to our existence individually and together in society. Their mission has been variously defined in the course of history, and the curriculum has altered accordingly. The study of the humanities embodies a philosophy and, I believe, something of a revelation that I have wanted to bring to conscious reflection in detailed readings of classic, thought-provoking texts.
This book grows out of a lecture course on “Great Books of Western Tradition” that I have given at Vanderbilt University throughout most of the 1990s and into the ensuing millennium. The course framed readings of representative classic works of literature within a general theory of the humanities that I developed under the influence of German thought about the Geisteswissenschaften. This theoretical background was married to a vision of poetry as prophecy and even prayer, itself the result of crossing an enthusiasm for English Protestant poets (particularly Blake, Milton, Spenser, and Herbert) with a passion for Dante and the Italian Catholic tradition through Vico and Manzoni. It has been nurtured by assiduous cultivation of Greek paideia and of the Latin rhetorical tradition as well.
Drawing on these backgrounds, the book endeavors not only to offer reactualized readings of representative humanities texts. The selections are linked together in such a way as to propose a general interpretation of knowledge in the humanities, as well as to emphasize a way of articulating its connection with what is, in various senses, called “divine revelation”—that of the sort to which poets since Homer have typically laid claim, as well as that proper to the biblical tradition of revealed religion.
The ground covered in this volume corresponds to only the first semester of the Great Books sequence I teach at Vanderbilt. I hope eventually to prepare for publication a sequel for which the working title is “Mythopoiesis in a Scientific Age.” It takes up the study of representative humanities texts from the Renaissance through the modern and contemporary periods in a theoretical framework that complements the one used here for reading ancient and medieval literature and extends it toward a more comprehensive philosophy of the humanities.
[Infinite Figures: Proposals for a New Theoretical Rhetoric]
One of the deepest roots of our thinking and of all theoretical speculation is to be discovered in the rhetorical tradition. To the extent that we are always thinking with and within language, the concepts and analyses of rhetoric—both the art and science of using language effectively—open up essential insights into the enabling and limiting conditions of our thought in every field of inquiry. The very substance of knowledge cannot be severed from its linguistic means and medium, which it is the province of rhetoric to systematically study and exploit.
The key unifying aspect of the approach taken in this work is the endeavor to think figurative language in a dimension of infinity--as uncircumscribed by any non-figurative substrate. The absolute reality of language becomes revelatory of reality as such in its absoluteness. The treatment is thereby marked as ultimately theological in inspiration. A poetics of revelation and specifically the Divine Comedy as a theological revelation in and through poetic form has been a major interest developing alongside and sometimes cross-fertilizing this project. Even if only indirectly, this essay adumbrates a theology of poetic language thought from the ground of rhetorical tradition. My purpose is not to define these commonest of concepts yet again, but to explore the vistas they can open up in certain theoretical humanities disciplines, particularly poetics, philosophy, and theology. The question at the core of the present inquiry is that of language as a revelation of being. Rhetoric here opens upon metaphysics. How does metaphor account for the unity of our experience? The riddles of metaphysics and the ultimate questions asked by religions, far from being solved, nevertheless become more lucid and meaningful when placed in this perspective of metaphor. My aim is to explore just how far rhetorical consciousness of the metaphorical medium of all our thought can illuminate perennial metaphysical and theological conundrums and our very way of experiencing and articulating the elusive meanings for which we live and act.
[Postmodern Theologics: Critical Theory in the Wake of the Death of God] This work brings out the theological underpinnings of major texts in the critical theory canon. It shows how their typically secularist assumptions tend to be deconstructed by the theological paradigms that they deploy, whether deliberately or implicitly and unconsiously. The key insights of postmodern theory, from the diacritical nature of the sign onwards, are opened thereby to being illuminated through the lens of a post-secular apophatic theology. I advocate this type of theology as a salutary, not to say salvific or redemptive, contribution of postmodernism to contemporary culture. Further Perspectives on my Work and its Future In developing and advocating my theory of poetic literature as religious revelation, I have pursued especially the challenge of extending my scholarship into further fields and disciplines. This mobility reflects the ethos of comparative literature as a discipline and also corresponds to my personal intellectual temperament. Once a discourse becomes “established” within the boundaries of a certain field of specialization, it begins to die: its authoritative status, as proved by the consensus of the "experts," becomes an impediment to untrammeled creative thinking. I felt compelled rather to attempt to traverse fields and cross boundaries by becoming conversant with the vocabularies of multiple disciplines. This is how I have sought proof of the relevance of my contribution not to specialized scholarship so much as to the perennial Odyssean adventure of the intellect. Humanities knowledge is essentially in movement and in transition. Rather than devoting myself to defending the hermeneutic paradigm and its application to the Divine Comedy that I laid out in my first book, I chose to take my essential insights in directions surpassing the limits of this framework. I began to explore the variety of ways in which poetry aspires to become prophecy--to perform some type of philosophical and ultimately religious revelation. So interpreted, poetry re-enacts the Promethean attempt to adapt divine fire to human uses. This idea of poetry as theological revelation has guided my work on Greek and Roman classics, the Bible, French Renaissance and German Baroque literature, as well as English and Italian Romanticism, Modernism, and contemporary movements in poetry.
I have been interested in the connections between humanities disciplines over the whole arc of development of Western culture, as well as in comparative perspectives with non-Western cultures (for instance, in my essay on Mahatma Gandhi 's ethics and the postcolonial discourse of Edward Said and in my course at the University of Salzburg on Apophaticism East and West, dealing with oriental expressions such as Advaita Vedanta, Nargajuna's Buddhism, and the Tao). The point of my scholarship has not been to establish definitive details so much as to grasp the epochal movement of humanities knowledge across different disciplines down through the ages.
This scope has been made possible partlcularly by my teaching roles in humanities and comparative literature. At Vanderbilt in comparative literature for the first fifteen years of my teaching carrer, as well as in a number of teaching appointments abroad, I have been responsible not for some specialized field like medieval Italian literature. This would have been the case for me in a national literature department at most major universities, but my appointment from the outset was rather to a comparative literature program at a moderate-sized research university. My training in Italian and especially in Dante placed me in the center of Western humanities tradition, yet I was more often called upon to speak to the interests of students in modern literature and theory. A great part of my publications are in fact on modern poetry and thought. However, my most concentrated knoweldge is in ancient and medieval culture, and these backgrounds have likewise proved continuously fruitful. My training in philosophical theology, moreover, has helped me to elaborate a comprehensive view of literature as disclosure of truth modeled on prophetic revelation from its inception in both Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian cultural matrices. Viewed together, the various components of my work propose in embryo a religious philosophy of the humanities. All my work in a sense has revolved around Dante’s Divine Comedy taken heuristically as the most complete instance of literary creation and poetic revelation at the center of Western tradition. I view the Comedia as revealing in its plenitude the educative purpose and mission of literature in the world that is still our own. My readings of literary works as disparate as contemporary lyric poetry, classical epic, and Renaissance drama are not all separate undertakings. All are extensions of an interpretation of literature that is founded on the realization of poetic potential in its fullness in Dante’s magnum opus. Each reading reflects on and illuminates the others. The theoretical concepts I employ vary, but they together make up a coherent approach to knowledge in the humanities. The unity of my work is defined not by its content in historical or geographic or generic terms. It is not delimited by being confined to a specific field of specialization or by parameters of time or space, but by its making a new conceptual whole out of the variety of texts and periods, cultures and languages that it engages and interprets. This is not a preexisting unity but one forged by the work itself. Such is the synthetic function of thought in general, and it is embodied with peculiar intensity in my critical and theoretical writing. This writing forms a corpus that makes a distinctive statement about what the capabilities and responsibilities of literary thinking in our time truly are. It proposes a philosophy of dialogue between radically incommensurable persons, mind-sets, and cultures and elaborates a poetics of revelation reaching into the religious sphere of the wholly other and ineffable.
My backgrounds in philosophy and theology, acquired early on in my career, have enabled me to undertake such a project. Having earned a BA in philosophy from Williams College, I pursued studies to the master’s level at Oxford University. I have continued theological study, oftentimes in the context of sojourns in various religious communities, including monastic orders and evangelical seminars. I have also participated in philosophy colloquia and summer sessions, for instance, repeatedly at the Istituto italiano per gli studi filosofici in Naples and the Collegium Phenomenologicum in Perugia, Italy, as well as in France at Cerisy (Centre Culturel International) and Evian (International Philosophy Colloquium). I have been helped to envisage contemporary issues in theory and culture concretely in a global perspective thanks especially to long-term residential fellowships in Potsdam (Germany), Cassis (France), and Bogliasco (Italy), as well as to semester-long appointments as Visiting Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong and as Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Intercultural Theology and Study of Religion at the University of Salzburg.
The Hong Kong appointment permitted me, furthermore, to participate in international conferences well beyond Europe and North America in Kuala Lampur, Malasia, in Canberra, Australia, and in Udaipur, India, and in each case I contributed to resulting publications with reflections touching on international aspects of literary study and theory. At the University of Salzburg, I lectured on Intercultural Theology and taught seminars in German, and I am invited for the future to teach in German on modern atavisms of ancient myths in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Tübingen. I have also taught French literature and Existentialism as Professor of French-in-residence at Vanderbilt-in-France in Aix-en-Provence (2008). Cultivation of languages is an aspect of intellectual life that is paramount for me. With the exception of the writing on the Old Testament, my scholarly work is all done in the original languages. This includes ancient Greek and Latin, as well as medieval languages such as langue d'oc and Middle High German. In the case of the modern languages, particularly English, Italian, French, German, and Spanish, this competence includes regular experience in speaking, beyond use of the languages for research. I have taught literature, theology, and philosophy in German, French, and Italian, as well as in English. The joy of studying literature for me is inseparable from immersion in the spoken vernaculars and from a continuing practice of living in the unique worlds opened up through each particular language. A direct poetic experience of the languages as spoken in everyday conversation has motivated me to want to participate deeply with various peoples in their reflection upon their life and history in and through literature. Study turns to love in this living communication and assimilation of the idiomatic character and specific beauty of peoples expressing themselves in their own native tongues.
The ultimate destination of this vision of poetic language as theological revelation is likely to be found in creative work beyond the critical and analytical reflection of my essays. This project for a new epic poetry, built on and extending my lyric vein, has for years been a constant aspiration and endeavor. In the future, I intend to make it more manifest in my published work.
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