Poetry and Apocalypse: Theological Disclosures of Poetic Language
Stanford University Press, 2008                                                                                                             available from   Stanford University Press
                                                                                                                                                                        Table of Contents and Reviews

Dichtung und Apokalypse: Theologische Erschliessungen der dichterischen Sprache (German translation)
Salzburger theologische Studien interkulturell (2009)

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.

On What Cannot Be Said:  Apophatic Discourses in Philosophy, Religion, Literature, and the Arts
University of Notre Dame Press, 2007            Cover Image            Amazon link

      

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.

On What Cannot Be Said, vol. 1

                                      Table of Contents and Excerpts

On What Cannot Be Said, vol. 2

                         Table of Contents and Excerpts

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.

Reveiwed by Andrea Aguti, Humanitas

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
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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
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Reviewed by:

James Torrens, Christianity and LIterature 45.3/4, Spring/Summer (1996): 416-18

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

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)