William Franke
Associate Professor of Comparative Literature


Brief Academic Biography

     William Franke trained in philosophy and theology at Williams College and Oxford University, and in comparative literature at Berkeley and Stanford (Ph.D. 1991). He is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Italian, as well as of Religious Studies, at Vanderbilt University, where he coordinates the graduate program in philosophy and literature. He has published philosophical and theological interpretations of poets, including Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Blake, Yeats, Leopardi, Manzoni, Montale, Racine, Baudelaire, Jabès, Celan, and Stevens. He has also published theoretical essays in hermeneutics and dialectics, treating such subjects as figurative rhetoric, dialectical and deconstructive logic, negative theology, and psychoanalysis as a hermeneutics of subjectivity. 
     His books include Dante’s Interpretive Journey, published in 1996 in the Religion and Postmodernism series of the University of Chicago Press.  It elaborates an existential theory of interpretation that critiques modern hermeneutic theories, particularly those of Heidegger and Gadamer, on the basis of the medieval theological vision of the Divine Comedy.  His On What Cannot Be Said (Notre Dame University Press, 2007) proposes a synoptic view of the Western tradition of apophatic discourse from Plato to postmodernism.  His forthcoming Poetry and Apocalypse (Stanford University Press, 2008) offers a theological reading of poetic language in the Christian epic tradition from the Bible and Dante to James Joyce. It also elaborates a critical negative theology of poetic language.
     He has been visiting associate professor of comparative literature at the University of Hong Kong (Fall 2005) and Fulbright Distinguished Chair for Intercultural Theology and Study of Religion at the University of Salzburg (Spring 2007).  He has received international fellowships from the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung (1994-95), the Camargo Foundation (Fall 1999), and the Bogliasco Foundation (Fellow in Philosophy, Spring 2006).


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 Poetry and Apocalypse: Theological Disclosures of Poetic Language (forthcoming in 2008 from Stanford University Press).
 
My book Dante’s Interpretive Journey (University of Chicago Press, 1996) 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.
 
Much of my subsequent work has been concerned especially with the question of the "beyond" of language, of what resists all efforts of interpretation and of saying.  My two-volume anthology-cum-history-and-theory on this topic 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) was published in 2007 by the University of Notre Dame Press.  The prefaces present a theoretical framework defining apophasis as a genre (Volume 1) as well as a mode of discourse (Volume 2), and the extensive introductions propose an historical outline of apophasis as an alternative history of Western thought, the history of what was never said and yet conditioned and impinged on all the discourses of Western intellectual tradition from beyond the threshold of language.  Twenty-seven authors and their key texts are introduced in each volume, beginning from Plato and the Neoplatonic commentaries on the Parmenides through medieval and baroque mysticisms, which are compared to Kabbalah and Sufi mysticism.  The second volume treats poets from Hölderlin through Rilke and Eliot, along with philosophers including Wittgenstein, Rosenzweig, Weil, Levinas, Derrida, and Marion, and considers theories by Schoenberg, Jankélévitch and Cage of how music verges on silence, to mention just a selection of the arts and authors and disciplines covered.

My forthcoming Poetry and Apocalypse: Theological Disclosures of Poetic Language 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 poetic language.  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 wide diversity of fields.  My goal has been to become conversant with the specific terms of different areas of study—different periods and literatures and disciplines—and then make connections between them on the basis of the concerns they share in common.  By this method, the mosaic of my scholarly writings presents rich materials to be framed into a general philosophy of the humanities.  This philosophical reflection on literature and the humanities is what my more specifically and directly theoretical writings aim to develop.  I sketch an epistemology of knowledge in the humanities in the Introduction to my book manuscript The Revelation of Imagination: From the Bible and Homer through Vergil and Augustine to Dante. 
 
 
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 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.  However, 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 these 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 and literature.  The major theses of this philosophy of literature—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 more freely and independently than in the interpretive essays focused on specific authors.  However, together they compose an ensemble forging the overarching ideas of a distinctive philosophy of the humanities together with more detailed and concrete analyses in which these ideas are seen in operation. 
 
Virtually all my writings are theoretical and philosophical; all refer to literature and are relevant to religion as well. Nevertheless, it may be helpful to break them down according to their emphasis on one or another of these areas.
 

Essays in Literary Theory
 
“The Ethical Posture of Post-Colonial Discourse in Said and in Gandhi”
Journal of Contemporary Thought 25 (Summer, 2007): 5-24

“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 

“Varieties and Valences of Unsayability in Literature"
Philosophy and Literature 29/2 (2005): 489-497

“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

“William Franke on Post-Structuralist Interpratation” 
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)].
 
“Metaphor and the Making of Sense: The Contemporary Metaphor Renaissance”
Philosophy and Rhetoric 33/2 (2000): 137-154.
  
 
Essays in Philosophy and Theology
 
“The Coincidence of Reason and Revelation in Communicative Openness: 
A Critical Negative Theology of Dialogue”
Journal of Religion

“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 Anja Bandas and William Franke
Salzburger Theologisher 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
 
“Psychoanalysis as a Hermeneutics of the Subject: Freud, Ricoeur, Lacan”
Dialogue: The Canadian Philosophical Review 38 (1998): 65-81

 
 Philosophical and Theological Essays on Modern 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,”
   ["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)

“Joyce” (“James Joyce’s Poetic Transformation of Prophetic Revelation in the Bible”)
Blackwell’s Companion to the Bible in English Literature,  
eds. Christopher Rowland, Christine Joynes, Rebecca Lemon, Emma Masson, Jonathan Roberts
(Oxford: Blackwells, 2008)
 
“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 Classical and Biblical Literature
 
“Virgil, History, and Prophecy”
Philosophy and Literature 29 (2005): 73-88
 
“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 
 
“The Ethical Vision of Dante’s Paradiso in Light of Levinas”
  Comparative Literature 59/3 (2007): 209-227 
 
"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” in The Cambridge Dictionary of Christianity 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 that are 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.  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.  Hence my fundamental 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, particular 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, in its extensive introductions, both general and specific, writes the history of traditions revolving around the problem of unsayability, the present manuscript develops 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.
 
This work 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.
 
 
[Poetry and Apocalypse: Theological Disclosures of Poetic Language]
 
The essays in this volume are literary-critical in nature and at the same time ventures in speculative philosophy and theology.  They propose a model for reading literature theologically, even as they illustrate a method for thinking through fundamental problems of theology in specifically literary terms.  They constitute a quest for poetic and religious vision granted each in and through the other.  Understanding language and its life as metaphor proves crucial to this endeavor.  Although the path blazed owes no specific allegiances to schools or movements, retrospectively it seems accurate to characterize the viewpoint that emerges as a postmodern negative theology of poetic language.  This perspective is presented as an alternative to the apocalyptic theology proposed by Thomas J.J. Altizer, since Altizer’s work similarly, but differently, apprehends genuinely epoch-making theology in works of literary, linguistic imagination from Dante to Joyce. 
 
 
[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 deliberately or implicitly deploy.  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 that I advocate as quintessentially postmodern. 
 

Further Perspectives on my Work and its Future
 
The primary challenge I have pursued is that of extending my scholarship into further fields and dimensions.  This belongs to the ethos of comparative literature as a discipline, and it also corresponds to my intellectual temperament.  More than concentrating on becoming “established” within the boundaries of a specific field of specialization, I felt compelled to attempt to traverse fields and cross boundaries by becoming conversant in 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 appreciating some of the peak experiences of intellectual search and to interpreting the overall significance of knowledge in the humanities.  Humanities knowledge is essentially in movement and in transition.  That is why rather than devoting myself to defending the hermeneutic paradigm and its application to the Divine Comedy, as I laid it out in my first book, I chose rather to pursue my essential insights in directions surpassing the limits of this framework.  The variety of ways that poetry aspires to become prophecy, to perform some type of philosophical or religious revelation, has guided my work on Greek and Roman classics, on the Bible, on French Renaissance and German Baroque literature, as well as on English and Italian Romanticism, Modernism, and contemporary movements in poetry. 
 
I have been interested in the connections between humanities disciplines and in the guiding threads of the whole arc of development of Western culture, as well as in comparative perspectives with non-Western cultures.  Therefore I have published broadly in a wide range of disciplines—chiefly literature, philosophy ,and religion—on authors from all periods, ancient to contemporary and in a variety of different national and linguistic traditions—especially English, Italian, French, and German.  The point of scholarship for me has been not to establish definitive details so much as to grasp the epochal movement of humanities knowledge across different disciplines and down through the ages.  This scope has been enabled partly by my teaching roles in humanities and comparative literature.  I have been responsible by virtue of my position in comparative literature at a moderate sized research university not for an area of specialization such as medieval Italian literature. This would have been the case for me in a national literature department, but my appointment was to a comparative literature program from the outset.  My training in Italian and especially in Dante placed me in the center of Western humanities tradition, but I was more often called upon to speak to the interests of students in modern literature and theory.  The majority of my publications are on modern authors and poetry.  Nevertheless, my ancient and medieval backgrounds have likewise proved continuously fruitful. My work in 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. Taken together, the various elements 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 revelation at the center of Western tradition.  I take 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 the interpretation of literature that is founded on the realization of poetic potential in its fullness in Dante’s work.  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 great variety of texts, and periods, and cultures and languages that it engages and interprets.  It is not a preexisting unity but one forged by this work itself.  This is the synthetic function of thought in general, and it is embodied in my critical and theoretical writing as a whole.  This writing forms a corpus that makes a distinctive statement about what the capabilities and responsibilities of literary and philosophical thinking in our time truly are.
 
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 at 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 frequently participated in philosophy colloquia and summer sessions, for instance, at the Istituto italiano per gli studi filosofici in Naples and the Collegium Phenomenologicum in Perugia, as well as at CERISY and Evian in France.  I have come to envisage contemporary issues in theory and culture 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.. 
 
Cultivation of languages is a further aspect of intellectual life that has particular importance 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 speaking as well as literary uses of the languages.  I have taught literature, theology, and/or philosophy in German, French, and Italian, as well as in English.  In fact, the joy of studying literature is inseparable for me from immersion in the spoken vernaculars and from continuing contact and cultivation of the worlds uniquely opened up through each new 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--along with that of the world at large--in and through literature.  Study turns to love in this living communication and assimilation of the idiomatic character and beauty of people expressing themselves in their 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.