20/05/2024 12:15 - 16:30

HALL: FATESI - TRIPPODO

Proponent: Gavrilyuk P., Pfau T.

Chair: Pfau T.

Speaker: Contino P., Gavrilyuk P., Pfau T.

The three requested sessions aim to explore the role of the spiritual senses in modern literature (post-1800), specifically, how the claims and concepts advanced by the long theological tradition of the spiritual senses are revived, inflected, and dramatized in modern poetry & prose. Particular attention will be given to theologically "literate" writers (e.g., Hopkins, Dostoevsky, Claudel, Eliot, Milosz, D. Jones, G. Hill). The premise is that "creative intuition" (Maritain), by integrating the spiritual and material, draws our attention to the revelatory, theologically significant character of all appearance. Unique about this constellation is the fact that, after 1700, the object of a narrative quest or of focalized, lyric attention by and large no longer involves God.  Instead, plot, story, and setting of much modern literature are defined by the transient goods of the saeculum (e.g., wealth, power, influence). Consequently, instances of spiritual perception in modern literature are typically framed less as fulfilling than as disrupting what Husserl calls the "natural perspective" (natürliche Einstellung) that individuals and communities have on their life-world. In the wake of Romanticism, modern literature frequently features characters deeply perplexed by the insoluble conflict between a calculative notion of rationality and numinous meanings "sensed" as incontrovertibly real, as is the case in the Romantic sublime and in epiphanic modernism.