Vanderbilt University:

Poetry and Apocalypse: Theological Disclosures of Poetic Language
Stanford University Press, 2008

This book 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.

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

On What Cannot Be Said, vol. 1

Table of Contents

On What Cannot Be Said, vol. 2

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

Sample Pages

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

Reviewed by:

Steven Botterill, Comparative Literature 50/2 (1998): 178-81

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)

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:

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)

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, The Metaphysics of Dante's Comedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005)

Sherry Roush, Herme's Lyre

POETRY AND APOCALYPSE

ON WHAT CANNOT BE SAID

DANTE'S INTERPRETIVE JOURNEY