Boundaries
The inflexible boundaries that are laid down by narrow definitions of race, nationalism and religion are shadowed by the boundaries that we ourselves remake as we try to make sense of our world. Our lives are not neatly divided and separated by these demarkations. Our stories are sometimes connected in ways that we can't even fathom, until the diversity of our stories is made clear to us through the inability of rigid boundaries to define, classify and label us.

Shadow lines are wide lines of negotiation that we all use to make sense of our differences, and our interconnections. They shift and change, break and re-form, swell and divide into spaces and patterns within the honesty of those of us who choose to ignore the straight, hard libnes and choose to step into a place where our stories have room to move, to dance and exist. These lines of story shadow all of us. They are not always eloquent, or enlightening. Some are brutal and difficult to reconcile.

Stephen Kinnane, Shadow Lines, (Freemantle: Freemantle Arts Centre Press, 2003).

The Fall as the Fall of Language







1. Language in Genesis 1: Word of God -> creation.
2. Language in Paradise as seen in Dante's Divine Comedy
Language at Pentecost (Acts 2: 1-13):
Unmediated meaning.
3. Language in Genesis 2: Perfect conjunction between signifier and signified.
4. Langage at Babel, (Gen 11:1-9): Multiple signifiers.
5. Language now: Disjunction between signifier and signified.




The Fall from innocence to experience not only divides the world but also introduces a definite structure of value: we fall from an undiffentiated knowledge of good to a differentiated and fatal knowledge of good and evil. From God's presence we pass to His absence; from immediacy to mediation; from the perfect congruence of sign and referent to the gap between word and object; from fulness of being to a lack of being; from ease and play to strain and labour; from purity to impurity; and from life to death (emphasis mine).

Kevin Hart, The Trespass of the Sign, (Cambridge & Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 5.





Upon meeting Adam in the eighth heaven of Paradise, Dante has no need to voice his questions, for, as Adam explains, the poet's intentions are already perfectly reflected in the 'veracious Mirror' of God. Dante, >Paradiso, (London: Dente & Sons, 1965), Canto XXVI, line 106.) A redeemed soul, entirely consonant with God's will, Adam knows Dante's thoughts with far more certainty than Dante can know the most elementary truth; his perception of the poet's mind is immediate, unhindered by language; and when he begins to answer, explaining the true cause of the Fall, Adam's hermeneutic mastery is no less complete. He deftly distinguishes between signum and res significata, informing us that the eating of the fruit merely indicated what was at issue, namely 'the trespass of the sign', a failure to observe the proper limits assigned to man by God. In short, Adam offers us a model of perfect understanding, one in which language can be mastered and in which intentions can easily be recovered, whether human or divine. How ironic, then, that the ideal Adam represents is witheld from us precisely because of Adam's sin. For, as the canto explains, although Adam's trespass was chiefly moral in character it was also a trespass of the linguistic sign- a desire for unmediated knowledge- and the sign of this disobedience is none other than the mutability of all signs. In Paradise, wholly one with God who stands above language as the 'Alpha and Omega of all Scripture', Adam now enjoys immediate knowledge in the manner approved by God, and for him interpretation poses no problem. On earth, however, the consequences of the Fall are still felt: man is no longer the master of signs but is frequently mastered by them, and the Commedia shows us many who have been damned precisely because they allowed themselves to be mastered by signs. One of these is Master Adam, the Florentine counterfeiter, whose very art is a trespass of the sign, the effacing of the difference between a sign and the sign of a sign. Dante's point in the Commedia is unmistakeable: the proliferation of signs caused by Adam and increased by those such as Master Adam can be arrested only by a belief that Christ, the New Adam, is the faithful sign of God. Without the presence of God, in Paradise or on earth, there can be no hope of understanding oneself, others, or texts. One would be lost in a maze of signs, with no possibility of distinguishing true from false.

Kevin Hart,The Trespass of the Sign,(Cambrideg & Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 3-4.

Mourning



Mourning is the repetition of what we do not have. But it is not just a yearning for what will never again make itself present: what distinguishes mourning from what Freud and his time called melancholia is that mourning affirms-or learns to affirm-this absence. On a thin thread of words, mourning calls up what was perhaps never there to begin with, and brings it into being. And that means that mourning is at the heart of so much we most value, and its continuing claim on us. The late Jacques Derrida catalogues many of these in the course of his work: friendship, justice, the debt and the gift, inheritance, responsibility, hospitality, tradition; literature, and the arts in general. In that mourning is inseparable from speculation in all senses of the word, its hospitality to the new is also at the heart of the scattered and various disciplines that make up the humanities.

From the e-mailed publicity for "Mourning and its Hospitalities," a conference at University of Queensland, 18-20 July 2007.

Woke up after a few hours’ sleep and realised it was still true. Girls phoned to say they are coming to get me, but I am not fit to face anyone. Thousands of letters. I know these people are actually hurting, but oh God what I’m feeling is beyond comfort. Nothing helps. Especially that ‘Death is nothing at all’ bollocks. Oh really? And no, he isn’t in the sodding next room. The thoughtful strangers say it will help me but it makes me roar with rage. OK, you say I’ll meet him again. Prove it. I would like to believe it, God I would like to. If I thought it was true I’d kill myself and meet him now. I have absolutely no sense of his presence. He is utterly gone and I can’t bear it.

Sheila Hancock, The Two of Us (London: Bloomsbury, 2005), 173.

Philip Larkin on the death of a hedgehog:

Next morning I got up and it did not
The first day after death, a new absence
Is always the same; we should be careful

Of each other, we should be kind
While there is still time.

Sheila Hancock, The Two of Us, (London: Bloomsbury, 2005), 297.


Time does not bring relief; you have all lied
Who told me time would ease me of my pain!
I miss him in the weeping of the rain;
I want him at the shrinking of the tide;
The old snows melt from every mountainside,
And last year’s leaves are smoke in every lane;
But last year’s bitter loving must remain
Heaped on my heart, and my old thoughts abide.
There are a hundred places where I fear
To go,— so with his memory they brim!
And entering with relief some quiet place
Where never fell his foot or shone his face
I say, “There is no memory of him here!”
And so stand stricken, so remembering him.

Edna St Vincent Millay

Sheila Hancock, The Two of Us, (London: Bloomsbury, 2005), 252.

A prayer from somebody just before the outbreak of the 1st world war, used at the funeral of the theologian John Taylor.

To have given me self-consciousness for an hour in a world so breathless for beauty would have been enough. But Thou has preserved it within me for twenty years and more, and has crowned it with the joy of this summer of summers. And so, come what may, whether life or death, and, if death, whether bliss unimaginable or nothingness, I thank thee and bless thy name.

Sheila Hancock, The Two of Us, (London: Bloomsbury, 2005), 271.

Food.






It is our suggestion that the medieval body was re-formed in the context of a collective effervescence of social relationships that can be typified a sacred eating community. Pasi Falk has defined an 'eating community' as a 'two-way order' shaped (or 'eaten into') by individuals during their daily lives . . . The Eucharist, for example, involved the incorporation of God as food into the body of the individual, and thereby incorporated the individual into the Body of Christ (the Church."

Phillip A. Mellor and Chris Shilling, Reforming the Body: Religion, Community and Modernity, (London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi: Sage, 1997),16.








The Mass emphasises the structure of interpenetration. When one eats the body of Christ and drinks his blood, the promise of resurrection is renewed. Because the Eucharist as a ritual focuses on eating, the body of Christ as food becomes a part of the person taking communion; it is intimately nutrition. In communion, the boundaries between one's own body and Christ's body become permeable: one is no longer separate from the other, no longer alone, no longer that is, and isolated self. Taking communion represents a devotional act toward Christ, one is instructed to 'do this in remembrance of Me.' Christ's body is taken into one's own, is re-membered in a human being's own renewed flesh and then formed, through the community, into the renewed body of Christ.

Leigh Gilmore, Autobiographics: a Feminist Theory of Women's Self-Representation, (Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press, 1994), 138.

Otherness (Alterity)






Poststructuralism represents a profound challenge to humanist values and enlightenment rationality. These are identified as having formed the ideological medium in which the violence of modern times is deeply rooted. Modernism's tragedy is judged to be a direct consequence of the repression of alterity, and poststructuralists have insisted that attention to what has been lost, silenced or repressed offers the best hope of regeneration.

Heather Walton. "Re-Visioning the Subject in Literature and Theology" in Heather Walton and Andrew W. Hass, eds, Self/Same/Other: Re-Visioning the Subject in Literature and Theology (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000), 11.

Emmanuel Levinas's . . . call to discern in the "face of the other" not self-likeness but irradicable strangeness makes possible the imaging of an ethics based upon difference rather than solidarity. Such an ethics rejects the attempt to draw the other into the territory of the same and celebrates a journey beyond the confines of the self towards that which challenges identity at its core. For Levinas it is the desire for the other which calls the self into being as it journeys beyond its own territory into a strange land.

Levinas is Jewish and his work is an extended reflection upon the rise of fascism and its legacy. His thoughts constitute a philosophical protest against the dark thread in humanist thinking which culminates in efforts to eradicate those elements which appear to lie outside the bounds of a possible incorporation into the common identity of the dominant group. Out of his oppposition to totalizing political and philosophical systems he discerns in the desire for the other the possibility of encounter with the sacred Other. The strangeness of human meeting deepens into the mystery of encounter with the divine.

The work of Levinas is woven from a religious inheritance in which the face of God is both hidden and sought out. He uses the Abrahamic motif to describe the formation of the self through a journey into an unknown place. No destination is achieved and there is no possibility of return.

Walton, Heather. "Re-Visioning the Subject in Literature and Theology" in Heather Walton and Andrew W. Hass, eds, Self/Same/Other: Re-Visioning the Subject in Literature and Theology. (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000), 32-3.

God-Talk

The reality of God is mystery beyond all imagining. So transcendent, so immanent is the holy mystery of God that we can never wrap our minds completely around this mystery and exhaust divine reality in words or concepts. The history of theology is replete with this truth: recall Augustine's insight that if we have understood, then what we have understood is not God; Anselm's argument that God is that than which nothing greater can be conceived; Hildegaard's vision of God's glory as Living Light that blinded her sight; Aquinas's working rule that we can know that God is and what God is not, but not what God is; Luther's stress on the hiddenness of God's glory in the shame of the cross; Simone Weil's conviction that there is nothing that resembles what she can conceive of when she says the word God; Sallie McFague's insistence on imaginative leaps into metaphor since no language about God is adequate and all of it is improper. It is a matter of the livingness of God.

Elizabeth A. Johnson, She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse, (New York: Crossroad, 1994), 7.



At least three responses to the primary dilemma of transcendence are conceivable. The first response is silence. The second response is to distinguish between ways in which the transcendent is beyond names and ways in which it is not. The third response begins with the refusal to solve the dilemma . . .The dilemma is accepted as . . . unresolvable, but this acceptance, instead of leading to silence, leads to a new mode of discourse. . . .

Apophasis is the commmon Greek designation for this language. Apophasis can mean "negation," but its etymology suggests a meaning that more precisely characterizes the discourse in question: apo phasis (un-saying or speaking away). . . . Any saying (even a negative saying) demands a correcting proposition, an unsaying. But that correcting proposition which unsays the previous proposition is in itself a "saying" that must be "unsaid" in turn. It is in the tension between the two propositions that the discourse becomes meaningful.

Michael A. Sells, Mystical Languages of Unsaying (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1994) 2-3.

Terms


writing the body
construction and deconstruction
the metanarrative
making and unmaking of the world
liminality
radix/matrix
site of/locus of
slippage between issues
foregrounding
subverting
negotiating power/powerlessness
interrogating issues
through the lens of

Postmodernism




The typical postmodernist work of art is arbitrary, eclectic, hybrid, decentred, fluid, discontinuous, pastiche-like. True to the tenets of postmodernity, it spurns metaphysical profundity for a kind of contrived depthlessness, playfulness and lack of affect, an art of pleasures, surfaces and passing intensities. Suspecting all assured truths and certainties, its form is ironic and its epistemology relativist and sceptical. Rejecting all attempts to reflect a stable reality beyond itself, it exists self-consciously at the level of form or language. Knowing its own fictions to be groundless and gratuitous, it can attain a kind of negative authenticity only by flaunting its ironic awareness of this fact, wryly pointing to its own status as a constructed artifice.

Terry Eagleton. Literary Theory: An Introduction. 2nd ed. Oxford UK & Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1997, 201-2.

Reading

DARKNESS AND LIGHT
Turner, Denys. The Darkness of God: Negativity in Christian Mysticism. Cambridge, New York & Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

DESIRE
Freud, Sigmund. Check anthologies of theory.

Lacan, Jacques. Check anthologies of theory.

Robert Hass. 'Meditation at Lagunitas' In monographs and many anthologies.

ENCLOSURES:
Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon Press, 1994.

Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. London & New York: Routledge, 1993.

THE GAZE
Mulvey, Laura. "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." In Feminism and Film Theory, edited by Constance Penley. New York & London: Routledge & BFI Publishing, 1988.

INTERTEXTUALITY/ALLUSION
Kronfeld, Chana. On the Margins of Modernism: Decentering Literary Dynamics. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1993.

Ben-Porat, Ziva. "The Poetics of Allusion." University of California, 1973.

Ben-Porat, Ziva. "The Poetics of Literary Allusion." PTL: A Journal of Descriptive Poetics and Theory of Literature 1, no. 1 (1976): 105-28.

LIMINAL ZONES
Bridges, William. The Way of Transition: Embracing Life's Most Difficult Moments. Cambridge Mass: Perseus, 2001.

Eliade, Mircea. Rites and Symbols of Initiation. New York: Harper & Row, 1958.
(Schreiter 1-9)

Trubshaw, Bob. The Metaphors and Rituals of Place and Time- An Introduction to Liminality or Why Christopher Robin Wouldn't Walk on the Cracks [Web-site]. Available from http://www.indigogroup.co.uk/edge/liminal/htm.

Turner, Victor. "Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites of Passage." In The Forest of Symbols. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967.

Turner, Victor. Process, Performance and Pilgrimage: A Study in Comparative Symbology. New Delhi: Concept, 1979. Esp chapter 1.

Turner, Victor. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. New York: Aldine Publishing Company, 1969.

Van Gennep, Arnold. The Rites of Passage. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1960.



LANGUAGE
Hart, Kevin. The Trespass of the Sign. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. 2nd ed. Oxford UK & Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1997. Chs 3 & 4.

Sells, Michael A. Mystical Languages of Unsaying. Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1994.

MARGINS AND CENTRE
Boff, Leonardo. Faith on the Edge: Religion and Marginalized Existence. Translated by Robert R. Barr. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1989.

PLACE
Kaufman, Shirley. ‘Here and There: the Use of Place in Contemporary Poetry’ in Stuart Friebert et al. A Field Guide to Contemporary Poetry and Poetics. Revised edition. Oberlin: Oberlin College Press, 1997.

Levis, Larry. "Eden and My Generation." In A Field Guide to Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, edited by Stuart et al Friebert. Oberlin: Oberlin College Press, 1997.

Rose, Jacqueline. States of Fantasy. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996.

POST-MODERNISM/MODERNISM
Kronfeld, Chana. On the Margins of Modernism: Decentering Literary Dynamics. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1993.

WRITING THE BODY
Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History. Baltimore & London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.

Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London & Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966.

Falk, Pasi. The Consuming Body. London: Sage, 1994. Church as sacred eating community.

Gilmore, Leigh. Autobiographics: a Feminist Theory of Women's Self-Representation. Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press, 1994. Chapter 4 and 5.

Greenblatt, Stephen. "Mutilation and Meaning." In The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe, edited by David Hillman and Carla Mazzio. New York & London: Routledge, 1997.

Mellor, Philip A, and Chris Shilling. Reforming the Body: Religion, Community and Modernity. London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1997.- Contains concept of Church as sacred eating community.

Rothfield, Philipa. "Bodies and Subjects: Medical Ethics and Feminism." In Troubled Bodies: Critical Perspectives on Postmodernism, Medical ethics, and the Body, edited by Paul A Komesaroff. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1995.

Rowe, Katherine. "'God's handy worke'." In The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe, edited by David Hillman and Carla Mazzio. New York & London: Routledge, 1997.

Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985. Chapter 4. JTL SY50S286

Schoenfeldt, Michael. "Fables of the Belly in Early Modern England." In The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe, edited by David Hillman and Carla Mazzia. New York & London: Routledge, 1997.

Slattery, Dennis Patrick. The Wounded Body: Remembering the Markings of Flesh. New York: State University of New York Press, 2000. (See especially chapter 10.)

Stevens, Scott Manning. "Sacred Heart and Secular Brain." In The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe, edited by David Hillman and Carla Mazzio. New York & London: Routledge, 1997.

Turner, Bryan S. The Body & Society: Explorations in Social Theory. 2nd ed. London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi: SAGE Publications, 1996.

GOD-TALK
Johnson, Elizabeth A. She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse. New York: Crossroad, 1994.
Sells, Michael A. Mystical Languages of Unsaying. Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1994.

OTHERNESS
Walton, Heather & Andrew W. Hass, eds. Self/Same/Other:Re-Visioning the Subject in Literature and Theology. Sheffield: Academic Press, 2000.

GENERAL
Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. 2nd ed. Oxford UK & Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1997.

Signs

Signifier= The word or image
Signified= The concept
Signifier + Signified = The Sign

Ferdinand de Saussure's two most famous theses are often termed his 'doctrines': of the 'arbitrariness' of the sign and of the a priori status of language vis-a-vis thought. Redefining 'word' not as the apparently solid entity that it is ordinarily considered to be but as composed, instead, of two elementary functions-the signifier or 'acoustic image,' by which sound is transmitted from speaker to hearer; and the signified, or 'conceptual image,' by which the sound-image is translated into a mental concept . . . Dramatically revising Kantian idealism, Saussure argues that language, rather than being a mere tool for expressing ideas, precedes all thought.

John Carlos Rowe, 'Structure' in Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin, (eds), Critical Terms for Literary Study, (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 29.


In our age there is an even greater crisis of representation. There is a sense that the reader of a text is caught within an endless chain of verbal signs; the meaning of a sign is to be found only in its 'difference' from others, and as what is signified becomes a signifier in its turn, final meaning is perpetually postponed.

Paul S. Fiddes, "The Quest for a Place Which Is 'Not-a-Place': The Hiddenness of God and the Presence of God," Silence and the Word, ed. Oliver Davies & Denys Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002) 39.