English Renaissance Literature and Contemporary Theory: Sublime Objects of Theology - Hardcover

Cefalu, Paul

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1403976694 ISBN 13: 9781403976697

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007

Synopsis

Cefalu offers the first sustained assessment of the ways in which recent contemporary philosophy and cultural theory -- including the work of Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Eric Santner, Slavoj Žižek, and Alenka Zupancic -- can illuminate Early Modern literature and culture. The book argues that when selected Early Modern devotional poets set out to represent subject-God relations, they often encounter some sublime aspect of God that, in Slovenian-Lacanian terms, seems "Other" to himself. This divine Other, while sometimes presented directly as a void or empty place, is more often filled in and presented instead as some form of divine excess. While Donne, and to a lesser extent Traherne, disavow those numinous aspects of God that might subsist beneath such excesses, Crashaw, and especially Milton, attempt to represent the intimate relationship between any creature's and God's intrinsic alterity. Cefalu introduces new ways of theorizing not only seventeenth-century religious ideologies, but also the nature of Early Modern subjectivity.

About this title

Review:

'This new work pushes the 'return to religion' into a 'return to theory,' pursued via exegetical and philosophical frameworks firmly located in the period of study, but with their roots and branches leading far wider than any 'contextual' approach could adequately map. In Cefalu's study, engagement with theology brings forward concepts, concerns and modes of reading that are born out of specific historical situations, traumas and debates, but are not reducible to them, modeling a theoretical approach to literature that is hermeneutically grounded in the very stuff of Western literariness (namely, its religious tropes, rhythms, and figures). Cefalu's chosen paradigm for encountering 'the sublime objects of theology' is Lacanian psychoanalysis, in the cultural and ethical spin given to it in the masterful work of Slavoj i ek and other members of the Slovenian school, including Mladen Dolor and Alenka Zupancic. This is a very timely book.' - Julia Reinhard Lupton, Professor of English and Comparative Literature

Synopsis:

This book offers the first sustained assessment of the ways in which recent contemporary philosophy and cultural theory - including the work of Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Eric Santner, Slavoj Zizek, and Alenka Zupancic - can illuminate Early Modern literature and culture.

About this edition

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 1403976694
• ISBN 13: 9781403976697
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 226