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Poetry and Apocalypse: Theological Disclosures of Poetic Language
Stanford University Press, 2009 available from: Stanford University Press
reviews, excerpts, etc.
selections at: Google Books
Poetry and Apocalypse offers an interdisciplinary synthesis, combining a philosophical theory of dialogue, 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 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 poetry. 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 undergirds this apocalyptic tradition provides the key to a radically new and open understanding of apocalypse as inextricably religious and poetic at the same time.
"Franke's theory of poetic language as negative theology is persuasive and helpful in illuminating the complex relationship between religion and literature."—Joel Harter, The Journal of Religion
“The book’s stated objective is ‘a postmodern negative theology of poetic language’ (ix) that is both theoretical and practical, contributing to both literary theory and theology and promoting peace through radical openness to dialogue, and it is to Franke’s credit that the result is both challenging and accessible.”—Joel Harter, The Journal of Religion
University of Salzburg Studies in Theology, vol. 39 (Intercultural 6)
Insbruck: Tyrolia Press, 2011
ISBN 978-3-7022-3050-0
(216 pages)
Dichtung und Apokalypse sucht nach den Prämissen eines Dialogs zwischen den Kulturen, insbesondere zwischen religiös-fundamentalistischen und modern-säkularistischen Haltungen. Die These ist, dass Dialog generell, um wirklich offen zu sein, sich für die Möglichkeit der religiösen Apokalypse öffnen muss. Eine solche Möglichkeit lässt sich am besten über die dichterische Erfahrung verstehen. In diesem Sinne wird die christliche Epik in die Tradition der prophetischen Überlieferung eingebunden und als eine Säkularisierung der theologischen Offenbarung ausgelegt. Ihre Sichtweise besteht dennoch auf dem wesentlich apokalyptischen Charakter von Wahrheit und ihrer Erschließung im Laufe der Geschichte. Die oft vernachlässigte Negative Theologie, die dieser apokalyptischen Überlieferung zu Grunde liegt, bietet den Schlüssel für ein neues und offenes Verständnis von Apokalypse in ihrer stets zugleich dichterischen wie religiösen Natur.
WILLIAM FRANKE ist Professor für Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft und für Religionswissenschaften an der Vanderbilt University in Tenessee / USA. Nach abgeschlossenen Magisterstudien in Philosophie und Theologie an der Oxford University und einem Doktorat in Komparatistik an der Stanford University war er Alexander von Humboldt-Stipendiat an der Universität Potsdam und Gastprofessor für Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft an der University of Hong Kong, sowie zuletzt Fulbright Professor am Zentrum Theologie Interkulturell und Studium der Religionen an der Universität Salzburg (2008). Zu seinen Publikationen zählen philosophische Betrachtungen über Dante und verschiedene Dichter und Denker von den Griechen (z.B. Homer, Damascius) bis zur Postmoderne (Derrida, Celan etc.), sowie als bisherige Monographien Dante’s Interpretive Journey (University of Chicago Press, 1996) und On What Cannot Be Said: Apophatic Discourses in Philosophy, Religion, Literature and the Arts (University of Notre Dame Press, 2007).
ON WHAT CANNOT BE SAID
These volumes propose to bring into comparison with one another some of the most enduringly significant attempts, in different disciplines within Western culture, to define the limits of language, and perhaps to exceed them. The tradition of negative theology will be compared with poetry of the ineffable and philosophical reflections on language that tend to define areas of inviolable silence. As pervasive a problem as the language of the Unsayable in Western tradition can best be treated at the intersection between disciplines, signally philosophy, theology, and poetry. It is, moreover, not the property of any one national tradition nor is it peculiar to any historical period and demands the wide-ranging comparative treatment that this volume proposes. Bringing together different disciplinary and cultural backgrounds is part of a design to catalyze open dialogue on “what cannot be said” lurking as an ineluctable provocation perhaps in all discourses. An anthology of classical and contemporary readings that have been milestones in the apophatic tradition is a resource that is most necessary to serve this dialogue that is already well underway and gaining in intensity.
From Reviews of On What Cannot Be Said
“These two volumes successfully realize a massive project: to propose and delineate a new field of discourse that provides a fresh approach to Western thought as a whole. In short, William Franke demonstrates the centrality of apophaticism, ‘what cannot be said,’ to the Western tradition, from Plato (and before) to Derrida (and beyond). . . . Franke’s work is nothing short of brilliant. . . . Franke shows incredible breadth of knowledge, critical acumen, and creative prowess throughout . . . . . [The] two volumes [are] essential reading for philosophers, theologians, literary scholars, intellectual historians, critical theorists—in short, anyone interested in an illuminating and vital perspective on just about any facet of Western arts and letters.”
—William Christopher Hackett, Religion and Literature, vol. 40.3, Autumn 2008
“. . . One of the most important and original contributions to the discussion of apophasis in recent years. . . . Franke’s historical and disciplinary range, in light of his well-written and compelling essays, provides an illuminating insight into the pervasiveness of apophatic discourse. . . . Few others, maybe no others, provide the same clarity, coherence, and scope; few, maybe none, provide the same provocation to think further and more deeply, to think otherwise the tradition from which we come.”
—Scott Bailey, Christianity and Literature 59.2 (2010)
"As an introduction to the phenomenon of apophatic discourse, Franke’s anthology is a great success. It often displays astounding breadth of knowledge and scholarship on the part of its editor. . . . This volume offers the only introductory anthology of negative theology that I know of, and it is superb."
—Bruce Milem, The Heythrop Journal, 51, no. 1 (2010): 174-175
Alois Halbmayr and Gregor Maria Hoff:
"Einen wichtigen Schritt auf dem Weg zu einer Geschichte der Negativen Theologie machen die beiden jüngst erschienenen, vorzüglich editierten und kommentierten Reader von Franke, William (Hg.), On What Cannot be Said. Appophatic Discourses in Philosophy, Religion, Literature and the Arts. Vol. I: Classic Formulations; Vol. II: Modern and Contemporary Transformations, Notre Dame 2007. Die Einleitungen lassen sich bereits als eine komprimierte Geschichte der Negativen Theologie lesen."
(The two superbly edited and commented volumes of the recently published reader of William Franke represent an important step on the way to a history of Negative Theology. On What Cannot be Said. Appophatic Discourses in Philosophy, Religion, Literature and the Arts. Vol. I: Classic Formulations; Modern and Contemporary Transformations, Notre Dame 2007. The introductions alone can be read as a compressed history of Negative Theology.)
From Negative Theologie Heute? Zum aktuellen Stellenwert einer umstrittenen Tradiition, eds. Alois Halbmayr and Gregor Maria Hoff (Freiburg-Basel-Wien: Herder, 2008). Introduction, p. 10.
"Lo scopo ambizioso e riuscito dell'antologia è proprio quello di mostrare la ricchezza delle espressioni del discorso apofatico che si registra nell'intero arco della filosofia occidentale, da Platone a J.-L. Marion, non tralasciando il suo rilievo in ambito teologico e in quello letterario."
(The ambitious and achieved aim of the anthology is to demonstrate the richness of the expressions of apophatic discourse as registered in the entire arc of Western philosophy from Plato to J.-L. Marion; it does this, moreover, without neglecting the importance of apophatic discourse also in the fields of theology and literature.)
--Andrea Aguti, Humanitas (2009)
"For a comprehensive survey of the apophatic tradition from Plato to Derrida in all its aspects see the introduction and critical essays in William Franke's impressive two-volume anthology, On What Cannot Be Said: Apophatic Discourses in Philosophy, Religion, Literature, and the Arts."
--Noam Reisner, Milton and the Ineffable (Oxford University Press, 2009), 8n.
DANTE'S INTERPRETIVE JOURNEY
Dante's Interpretive Journey
University of Chicago Press, 1996
Religion and Postmodernism series
Franke, William Dante's Interpretive Journey. 261 p. 6 x 9 1996 Series: (RP) Religion and Postmodernism Series
Dante’s Interpretive Journey proposes a theory of the existential, theological structures of interpretation by which our lives in language are constructed. It brings the theological hermeneutics of Dante’s poem into contact with modern philosophical hermeneutics as developed particularly by Heidegger and Gadamer. It explores a variety of theories of interpretation, medieval and modern, in an attempt to open original insights into the nature of interpretation, notably its existential ground and openness to transcendence in directions traditionally conceptualized in terms of religious revelation.
Sample Pages
Incomplete on-line version
Short Description:
Critically engaging the thought of Heidegger, Gadamer, and others, William Franke contributes both to the criticism of Dante's Divine Comedy and to the theory of interpretation.
Reading the poem through the lens of hermeneutical theory, Franke focuses particularly on Dante's address to the reader as the site of a disclosure of truth. The event of the poem for its reader becomes potentially an experience of truth both human and divine. While contemporary criticism has concentrated on the historical character of Dante's poem, often insisting on it as undermining the poem's claims to transcendence, Franke argues that precisely the poem's historicity forms the ground for its mediation of a religious revelation. Dante's dramatization, on an epic scale, of the act of interpretation itself participates in the self-manifestation of the Word in poetic form.
Dante's Interpretive Journey is an indispensable addition to the field of Dante studies and offers rich insights for philosophy and theology as well.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Preface
Introduction: Truth and interpretation in the Divine Comedy
1: Historicity of Truth
2: Truth through Interpretation and the Hermeneutic of Faith
3: Interpretive Ontology: Dante and Heidegger
Ch. 1: The Address to the Reader
1: The Ontological Import of the Address to the Reader
2: Reader's Address as Scene of the Production of Sense
3: Truth, Sendings, Being-Addressed: Deconstruction versus Hermeneutics or Dialogue with Derrida?
4: A Philological Debate: Auerbach and Spitzer
5: Petrarch, Boccaccio, and the Fiction of Philology
Ch. 2: Dante's Hermeneutic Rite of Passage: Inferno IX
1: Blockage
2: Passage
3: Ambiguities
4: Appendix: Hermeneutics, Phenomenology, and the Meaning of a Modern Understanding of Dante
Ch. 3: The Temporality of Conversion
1: Interpretation as Ontological Repetition and Dante's Fatedness
2: Ecstatic and Repetitive Temporality
3: Phenomenology of Fear/Anxiety in Inferno I
4: Dantesque Allegory and the Act of Understanding
Ch. 4: The Making of History
1: Relocating Truth: From Historical Sense to Reader's Historicity
2: Reality and Realism in Purgatorio X
3: Some History (and a Reopening) of the Question of the Truth of the Commedia
Ch. 5: Resurrected Tradition and Revealed Truth
1: Dante's Statius
2: Hermeneutics, Historicity, and Suprahistorical Truth
Recapitulatory Prospectus: A New Hermeneutic Horizon for Religious Revelation in Poetic Literature?
Core Bibliography of Recurrently Cited Sources
Index
Sample Pages
Google on-line version
Reviewed by:
James Torrens, Christianity and LIterature 45.3/4, Spring/Summer (1996): 416-18 online review pdf
Steven Botterill, Comparative Literature 50/2 (1998): 178-81 online review
Giuseppe Cavatorta, Lectura Dantis 20-21 (1997): 103-106
Stanley Benfell, Religion and Literature 31/2 (1999): 87-93
Joseph Luzzi, Italica 74/3 (1997): 412-13
Brian Horne, Literature and Theology 11/1 (1997)
Edward Donald Kennedy, The Comparatist 22 (1998): 204-05
Stephanie Paulsell, Religious Studies Review 24/3 (1998)
Elizabeth Mazzocco, Rivista di studi italiani 16/2 (1998): 554-555
Manfred Lenzen, Deutsches Dante-Jahrbuch 73 (1998): 214-15
John Dally, Journal of Religion 79/2 (1999)
John A. Scott, The Modern Language Review, April 1, 1999
Ronald L. Martinez, Speculum January 1999
Paolucci, Choice
Marcellina Trocarelli, Letteratura Italiana Antica 4 (2003): 524-26
Unpublished reviews by:
Giuseppe Mazzotta (see, however, Speculum, Vol. 74, No. 1 (Jan., 1999), pp. 187-189
Donald Marshall
Thomas Altizer
David Wood
Cited and/or discussed in:
Dante: Da Firenze all’aldilà (Atti del terzo Seminario dantesco internazionale, Firenze, 9-11 giugno 2000),ed, Michelangelo Picone (Florence: Cesati, 2001), p. 76 (My Italian interventions: pp. 121, 280)
Jennifer Margaret Frazer, Rite of Passage in the Narratives of Dante and Joyce (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002)
Guy Raffa, Divine Dialectic: Dante's Incarnational Poetics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000)
Amilcare Iannucci, “Already and Not Yet: Dante’s Existential Eschatology,” in Dante for the New Millennium, ed. Teodolinda Barolini and H. Wayne Storey (Fordham University Press, 2003), p. 438.
Giuseppe Ledda, La guerra della lingua: Ineffabilità, retorica e narrative nella Commedia di Dante (Ravenna: Longo, 2002)
Christine O'Connel Bauer, Dante's Hermeneutics of Salvation: Passages to Freedom in the Divine Comedy
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007)
Rewriting Virgil in the Commedia
Daniel J. Pinti
Christian Moevs
Christian Moevs, The Metaphysics of Dante's Comedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005)
James Miller, Dante and the Unorthodox: The Aesthetics of Transgression (Canada: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2005), pp. 423-24
Sherry Roush, Herme's Lyre: Italian Poetic Self-Commentary from Dante to Tommaso Campanella (2002)
T. A. Hipolito, "Ancient and Modern in Dante's Vita Nuova," Renasence (Winter 2003), p. 16
Else Jongeneel, " Art and Divine Order in the Divina Commedia ," Literature and Theology (2007)
Gregory B. Stone, Dante's Pluralism and the Islamic Philosophy of Religion (New York: Palgrave, 2007) , p. 285.
David Gibbons, Metaphor in Dante (Oxford: Legenda, 2002)
Winthrop Wetherbee, The Ancient Flame: Dante and the Poets (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 2008)
Jeremiah Alberg, A Reinterpretation of Rousseau: A Religious System, Forward by René Girard (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007)
Raffaele de Benedictis, Worldly Wise: The Semiotics of Discourse in Dante's Commedia (New York: Peter Lang, 2011), pp.
Marjorie O'Rourke Boyle, "Closure in Paradise: Dante Outsings Aquinas," MLN 115, no. 1 (2001): 1-12.
['For the ontological import of the address to the reader, see William Franke, “Dante's Intepretive Journey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 37-81. He specifically and correctly notes Dante's opposition to Aquinas's denial of "ontological efficacy and depth to poetic language," p. 58.']
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