RepresentationsPub Date : 2021-02-01DOI: 10.1525/REP.2021.153.4.51
Rachel R. Smith
{"title":"“As Often as His Heart Beat, the Name Moved”","authors":"Rachel R. Smith","doi":"10.1525/REP.2021.153.4.51","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/REP.2021.153.4.51","url":null,"abstract":"This essay considers an instance of medieval fictionality through the devotional text The Life of the Servant by the Dominican Henry Suso, specifically, through an examination of the “Servant’s” attempt to identify with Christ. Two forms of doubleness issue from this attempt, namely, the human servant seeking to embody the divine without remainder and his figuration as sinner and savior. Insofar as the text allows for a play between these polarities, the servant’s devotional practice can be understood as inhabiting the “as if,” or a kind of fictionality. The temptations of a devotional literalism—fiction striving to overcome its fictionality—is portrayed in the Life alongside a vision of devotion that retains the suspensions and play of the fictional.","PeriodicalId":47353,"journal":{"name":"Representations","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43703387","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
RepresentationsPub Date : 2021-02-01DOI: 10.1525/REP.2021.153.3.29
Julie Orlemanski
{"title":"Literary Persons and Medieval Fiction in Bernard of Clairvaux’s Sermons on the Song of Songs","authors":"Julie Orlemanski","doi":"10.1525/REP.2021.153.3.29","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/REP.2021.153.3.29","url":null,"abstract":"Like many exegetes before him, the twelfth-century Cistercian abbot Bernard of Clairvaux regarded the lovers in the Song of Songs as allegorical fictions. Yet these prosopopoeial figures remained of profound commentarial interest to him. Bernard’s Sermons on the Song of Songs returns again and again to the literal level of meaning, where text becomes voice and voice becomes fleshly persona. This essay argues that Bernard pursued a distinctive poetics of fictional persons modeled on the dramatic exegesis of Origen of Alexandria as well as on the Song itself. Ultimately, the essay suggests, Bernard’s Sermons form an overlooked episode in the literary history of fiction.","PeriodicalId":47353,"journal":{"name":"Representations","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43716466","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
RepresentationsPub Date : 2021-02-01DOI: 10.1525/REP.2021.153.6.85
Eleanore Craig
{"title":"The Ambiguity of Devotion","authors":"Eleanore Craig","doi":"10.1525/REP.2021.153.6.85","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/REP.2021.153.6.85","url":null,"abstract":"This article offers a reading of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s 1982 experimental text DICTEE as performing purposefully ambiguous devotional work. As a meditation on unfinished struggles against colonial and patriarchal violence, DICTEE registers devotion’s role in both oppression and liberation. Cha’s engagements with female martyrs, Korean mudang shamanic practice, and colonial languages demonstrate the inseparability of structures of domination and traditions of resistance. The essay argues that even as DICTEE wrestles with inescapable forms of complicity, its efforts to transform perception denaturalize the violence of racial, gendered, and political divisions.","PeriodicalId":47353,"journal":{"name":"Representations","volume":"153 1","pages":"85-104"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46437390","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
RepresentationsPub Date : 2021-02-01DOI: 10.1525/REP.2021.153.5.68
Robert G. Davis
{"title":"Prayer and the Art of Literature in Anselm of Canterbury’s Proslogion","authors":"Robert G. Davis","doi":"10.1525/REP.2021.153.5.68","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/REP.2021.153.5.68","url":null,"abstract":"This article reads the Proslogion of the medieval theologian Anselm of Canterbury as a drama of seeking and finding God. It guides the reader through a process of rhetorical inventio, with all of its attendant risks, pleasures, and discontents. The text opens a space or gap of desire, speaking in the voice of the soul who seeks anxiously to find (invenire) God but turns up only absence. The “I” who speaks and addresses itself to itself and to God learns not to close that gap but to inhabit it, affectively and intellectually, just as the monastic rhetor must, when he directs his inventive activity to God.","PeriodicalId":47353,"journal":{"name":"Representations","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48047591","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
RepresentationsPub Date : 2021-01-01DOI: 10.1525/rep.2021.153.2.11
Constance M. Furey
{"title":"Impersonating Devotion","authors":"Constance M. Furey","doi":"10.1525/rep.2021.153.2.11","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/rep.2021.153.2.11","url":null,"abstract":"What can biblical psalms teach us about literary devotion? An unexpected answer to that question is provided by Philip Sidney’s The Defence of Poesy (1595), a touchstone of literary criticism in its time and in ours. The argument in this essay unfolds from analysis of a single paragraph, which reveals how Sidney’s description of King David’s Psalms challenges our regnant categories in the following way: If today religion connotes fidelity or devotion to an external authority, as for many it does, and if literature entails authorial sovereignty and independent creativity (also a widespread assumption), then Sidney’s approach deviates by equating divine inspiration with poetic creativity. His celebration of variable voices and personae, in particular, undermines the distinction between fidelity and autonomy by offering the psalmist’s voice as a model of transformative self-expression.","PeriodicalId":47353,"journal":{"name":"Representations","volume":"30 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66929608","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
RepresentationsPub Date : 2021-01-01DOI: 10.1525/rep.2021.154.2.10
M. Feldman
{"title":"Fugitive Voice","authors":"M. Feldman","doi":"10.1525/rep.2021.154.2.10","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/rep.2021.154.2.10","url":null,"abstract":"This essay proposes that current-day notions of fugitivity, understood in the terms Fred Moten proposes as a category of the irregular that escapes easy representations and predications, can undiscipline music histories in productive ways. Among these: it can inflect musicological thinking through attention to sonic remainders of haunted pasts; it can decenter understandings of the aesthetic; and it can lead to more nuanced thinking about the imbrication of music in an “undercommons” of life that refuses ever to fully sound in harmony, residing instead in a disordered space of restless, noisy sound. The essay asks, finally, how such thinking, developed by Moten, Nathaniel Mackey, and Daphne Brooks, among others, can remake aspects of musicological thinking about voice.","PeriodicalId":47353,"journal":{"name":"Representations","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66929630","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
RepresentationsPub Date : 2021-01-01DOI: 10.1525/rep.2021.154.9.113
M. Denning, Gary A. Tomlinson
{"title":"Cantologies","authors":"M. Denning, Gary A. Tomlinson","doi":"10.1525/rep.2021.154.9.113","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/rep.2021.154.9.113","url":null,"abstract":"Cantology names an approach to the songish impulses that are a ubiquitous aspect of human cultures. It aims to divert our attention from the more restricted objects of musicological and ethnomusicological scrutiny by discerning song formations, conditions of possibility that define experiences of society and history along songish lines. These formations, local phenomena in cantology’s broad purview, emerge from the interactions of levels of cultural production including the performative, the discursive, the metadiscursive, and the archaeological. We outline a cantological theory, then briefly characterize four successive song formations in the West, reaching from the sixteenth century to the twenty-first.","PeriodicalId":47353,"journal":{"name":"Representations","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66929680","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
RepresentationsPub Date : 2021-01-01DOI: 10.1525/rep.2021.153.7.105
Kris Trujillo
{"title":"Queer Melancholia","authors":"Kris Trujillo","doi":"10.1525/rep.2021.153.7.105","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/rep.2021.153.7.105","url":null,"abstract":"GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies, founded in 1993, offers an exemplary site for understanding the rise of queer theory, which, from the start, has struggled with the tension between institutionalization and radical resistance. By situating the emergence of this journal and queer theory in general within the AIDS crisis and the literary tradition of the elegy, this essay offers a reading of conventional academic practices as rituals of queer melancholia that comes to challenge the assumption of queer theory’s secularity.","PeriodicalId":47353,"journal":{"name":"Representations","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66929616","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
RepresentationsPub Date : 2020-10-21DOI: 10.1525/rep.2020.152.4.85
Sebastian P. Klinger
{"title":"Political Theology or Theological Politics? Hugo Ball, Early Christian Hagiography, and a New Vision for Society","authors":"Sebastian P. Klinger","doi":"10.1525/rep.2020.152.4.85","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/rep.2020.152.4.85","url":null,"abstract":"A contribution to modernist studies and the history of political ideas, this article examines the unlikely intellectual dialogue between Carl Schmitt (1888–1985) and the former Dadaist Hugo Ball (1886–1927) that frames the formative scene of politico-theological discourse in the twentieth century. Based on close readings of Ball’s aesthetic, intellectual, and philosophical exchanges with Schmitt, the essay offers insights into the peculiar case of a Catholic intervention into political theology.","PeriodicalId":47353,"journal":{"name":"Representations","volume":"152 1","pages":"85-102"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2020-10-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41828637","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
RepresentationsPub Date : 2020-10-21DOI: 10.1525/rep.2020.152.2.25
Lorna Hutson
{"title":"On the Knees of the Body Politic","authors":"Lorna Hutson","doi":"10.1525/rep.2020.152.2.25","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/rep.2020.152.2.25","url":null,"abstract":"This paper analyzes the fullest theoretical elaboration of the doctrine of the King’s Two Bodies in the Elizabethan period, Edmund Plowden’s Treatise on the Succession (1567). It argues that Plowden here deploys the King’s Two Bodies not, as has been thought, as a legal proof against the foreign birth of Mary Queen of Scots, but as a way of embodying and sacralizing the disputed historical relations of England and Scotland. Plowden’s sacralizing metaphors of embodiment transform the highly contentious English claim of Scotland’s historic vassalage into the indisputable and timeless truth of political theology.","PeriodicalId":47353,"journal":{"name":"Representations","volume":"152 1","pages":"25-54"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2020-10-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44073026","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}