This monograph 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 in which the philosophical principles worked out on a theoretical plane are illustrated and applied.  Finally, it engages with philosophical theologies and philosophies of religion in the debate over negative theology, demonstrating the irresistible infiltration of negative theology into the thinking even of those who attempt to deny or delimit it. 

forthcoming from University of Notre Dame Press

Continuum:  New Directions in Religion and Literature Series 
ISBN: 9781441160423  (paperback)    9781441136916 (hardcover)
192 pages

In Dante and the Sense of Transgression, William Franke combines literary-critical analysis with philosophical and theological reflection to cast new light on Dante’s poetic vision.  Conversely, Dante’s medieval masterpiece becomes our guide to rethinking some of the most pressing issues of contemporary theory.

Beyond suggestive archetypes like Adam and Ulysses that hint at an obsession with transgression beneath Dante’s overt suppression of it, there is another and a prior sense in which transgression emerges as Dante’s essential and ultimate gesture.  His work as a poet culminates in the Paradiso in a transcendence of language towards a purely ineffable, mystical experience beyond verbal expression.  Yet Dante conveys this experience, nevertheless, in and through language and specifically through the transgression of language, violating its normally representational and referential functions.  Paradiso’s dramatic sky-scapes and unparalleled textual performances stage a deconstruction of the sign that is analyzed philosophically in the light of Blanchot, Levinas, Derrida, Barthes, and Bataille, as transgressing and transfiguring the very sense of sense. 

‘Written in elegant and astonishingly readable prose, William Franke's  volume gives a lucid portrait of a fundamental question that lies at the heart of Dante's Divine Comedy and has resurfaced in contemporary French philosophical reflection: poetic theology as a radical, transgressive mode of knowledge.  In mapping the ground of this fascinating debate, William Franke places Dante at the boundaries of thought and recovers the timeliness of his spiritual vision.  This book is a must-read for historians of religion, Dante scholars, literary critics, and adepts of cultural studies.’  - Giuseppe Mazzotta, Yale University, USA

Interview with Chris Benda--Podcast

Poetry and Apocalypse: Theological Disclosures of Poetic Language
Stanford University Press, 2009                                                                                           available from:   Stanford University Press
                                                                                                                                                                                  reviews, excerpts, etc.
                                                                                                                                                     selections at:           Google Books

Reviewed by:

Joel Harter, Journal of Religion  90 (2010): 104-106         (pdf version)

Dorothy Z. Baker, Comparative Literature Studies 46/4 (2009): 674-676: 

Lee A. Jacobus, James Joyce Quarterly 46/3-4 (2009): 624-627

"Franke's theory of poetic language as negative theology is persuasive and helpful in illuminating the complex relationship between religion and literature."—Joel Harter, The Journal of Religion

“The book’s stated objective is ‘a postmodern negative theology of poetic language’ (ix) that is both theoretical and practical, contributing to both literary theory and theology and promoting peace through radical openness to dialogue, and it is to Franke’s credit that the result is both challenging and accessible.”—Joel Harter, The Journal of Religion

"Poetry and Apocalypse: Theological Disclosures of Poetic Language is a profound and radical study that holds many surprises. . . ."  Dorothy Z. Baker, Comparative Literature Studies

Translation into German by Michael Sonntag and Ursula Liebing:

Dichtung und Apokalypse:
Theologische Erschliessungen der dichterischen Sprache

Aus dem Amerikanischen von Ursula Liebing und Michael Sonntag

Salzburger Theologische Studien Band 39

University of Salzburg Studies in Theology, vol. 39 (Intercultural 6)
Insbruck: Tyrolia Press, 2011
ISBN 978-3-7022-3050-0
(216 pages)

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.

WILLIAM FRANKE ist Professor für Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft und für Religionswissenschaften an der Vanderbilt University in Tenessee / USA. Nach abgeschlossenen Magisterstudien in Philosophie und Theologie an der Oxford University und einem Doktorat in Komparatistik an der Stanford University war er Alexander von Humboldt-Stipendiat an der Universität Potsdam und Gastprofessor für Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft an der University of Hong Kong, sowie zuletzt Fulbright Professor am Zentrum Theologie Interkulturell und Studium der Religionen an der Universität Salzburg (2008). Zu seinen Publikationen zählen philosophische Betrachtungen über Dante und verschiedene Dichter und Denker von den Griechen (z.B. Homer, Damascius) bis zur Postmoderne (Derrida, Celan etc.), sowie als bisherige Monographien Dante’s Interpretive Journey (University of Chicago Press, 1996) und On What Cannot Be Said: Apophatic Discourses in Philosophy, Religion, Literature and the Arts (University of Notre Dame Press, 2007).

      

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 is 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 it 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. The excerpted are itnroduced by detailed critical-theoretical essays, and the volumes are furnished each with general introductions and prefaces outlining a history of apophasis, ancient and modern, and a theory of apophasis as a genre and a mode of discourse.

On What Cannot Be Said, vol. 1

                                      Table of Contents and Excerpts

On What Cannot Be Said, vol. 2

                         Table of Contents and Excerpts

From Reviews of On What Cannot Be Said

“These two volumes successfully realize a massive project: to propose and delineate a new field of discourse that provides a fresh approach to Western thought as a whole. In short, William Franke demonstrates the centrality of apophaticism, ‘what cannot be said,’ to the Western tradition, from Plato (and before) to Derrida (and beyond). . . . Franke’s work is nothing short of brilliant. . . . Franke shows incredible breadth of knowledge, critical acumen, and creative prowess throughout . . . . . [The] two volumes [are] essential reading for philosophers, theologians, literary scholars, intellectual historians, critical theorists—in short, anyone interested in an illuminating and vital perspective on just about any facet of Western arts and letters.”

—William Christopher Hackett, Religion and Literature, vol. 40.3, Autumn 2008

“. . . One of the most important and original contributions to the discussion of apophasis in recent years. . . . Franke’s historical and disciplinary range, in light of his well-written and compelling essays, provides an illuminating insight into the pervasiveness of apophatic discourse. . . . Few others, maybe no others, provide the same clarity, coherence, and scope; few, maybe none, provide the same provocation to think further and more deeply, to think otherwise the tradition from which we come.”

—Scott Bailey, Christianity and Literature 59.2 (2010)

"As an introduction to the phenomenon of apophatic discourse, Franke’s anthology is a great success. It often displays astounding breadth of knowledge and scholarship on the part of its editor. . . . This volume offers the only introductory anthology of negative theology that I know of, and it is superb."

—Bruce Milem, The Heythrop Journal, 51, no. 1 (2010): 174-175

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.

"Lo scopo ambizioso e riuscito dell'antologia è proprio quello di mostrare la ricchezza delle espressioni del discorso apofatico che si registra nell'intero arco della filosofia occidentale, da Platone a J.-L. Marion, non tralasciando il suo rilievo in ambito teologico e in quello letterario."

(The ambitious and achieved aim of the anthology is to demonstrate the richness of the expressions of apophatic discourse as registered in the entire arc of Western philosophy from Plato to J.-L. Marion; it does this, moreover, without neglecting the importance of apophatic discourse also in the fields of theology and literature.)

--Andrea Aguti, Humanitas (2009)

"For a comprehensive survey of the apophatic tradition from Plato to Derrida in all its aspects see the introduction and critical essays in William Franke's impressive two-volume anthology, On What Cannot Be Said: Apophatic Discourses in Philosophy, Religion, Literature, and the Arts."

--Noam Reisner, Milton and the Ineffable (Oxford University Press, 2009), 8n.

Marilynne Robinson citation and comment in COMMONWEAL:

Over the years I have collected so many books that, in aggregate, they can fairly be called a library. I don’t know what percentage of them I have read. Increasingly I wonder how many of them I ever will read. This has done nothing to dampen my pleasure in acquiring more books. But it has caused me to ponder the meaning they have for me, and the fact that to me they epitomize one great aspect of the goodness of life. Recently I bought a book titled On What Cannot Be Said: Apophatic Discourses in Philosophy, Religion, Literature, and the Arts, Volume One: Classic Formulations. The title itself is worth far more than the price of the book, and then there is the table of contents. So far I have read only the last and latest selection, from The Wandering Cherub by Silesius Angelus, who wrote in the seventeenth century.

In the stack of magazines, read and unread, that I can never bring myself to throw away, there are any number of articles suggesting that science, too, explores the apophatic—reality that eludes words—dark matter, dark energy, the unexpressed dimensions proposed by string theory, the imponderable strangeness described by quantum theory. These magazine essays might be titled “Learned Ignorance,” or “The Cloud of Unknowing,” or they might at least stand beside Plato’s and Plotinus’s demonstrations of the failures of language, which are, paradoxically, demonstrations of the extraordinary power of language to evoke a reality beyond its grasp, to evoke a sense of what cannot be said.

I love all this for a number of reasons, one of them being that, as a writer, I continually attempt to make inroads on the vast terrain of what cannot be said—or said by me, at least. I seem to know by intuition a great deal that I cannot find words for, and to enlarge the field of my intuition every time I fail again to find these words. That is to say, the unnamed is overwhelmingly present and real for me. And this is truer because the moment it stops being a standard for what I do say is the moment my language goes slack and my imagination disengages itself. I would almost say it is the moment in which my language becomes false. The frontiers of the unsayable, and the avenues of approach to those frontiers, have been opened for me by every book I have ever read that was in any degree ambitious, earnest, or imaginative; by every good teacher I have had; by music and painting; by conversation that was in any way interesting, even conversation overheard as it passed between strangers.

Jeff L. Pool, Religious Studies Review 37 (March 2011): 41-42.

Jack L. Sammons review:
This is a terrific collection of what might be considered the essential documents of apophatic discourse. This volume contains modern and contemporary versions of writings about that which cannot be said. The introduction is excellent, although really it is more of an article on its own than an introduction, and each document is also very thoughtfully introduced, primarily by putting it in the overall context of the author's work and giving a thought or two to how it relates to a central theme of negative theology. In fact, rather than entitling this "apophatic discourses, it might have been better to say that these are (mostly) secular discourses about negative theology for this, it seems to me, is the author's true interest. In any case, the book is extremely useful for anyone thinking about that which cannot be said. There are surely quibbles -- well, more than quibbles -- along the way with the author's take on the various pieces, and some of the choices are, well, clearly idiosyncratic and perhaps eve a little strange. This, however, is inevitable in a collection such as this that breaks new ground in creating a discipline. While already familiar with most of the pieces, I truly enjoyed the journey that this collection creates. It's a lovely bit of work.

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
Incomplete on-line version

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
Google on-line version

Reviewed by:

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

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  (see, however, Speculum, Vol. 74, No. 1 (Jan., 1999), pp. 187-189 

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)