This article explores the notion of eros and education by turning to erotic literature: specifically, Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost. In this early play, Shakespeare portrays a sophisticated Renaissance world in which the conventions of literary education overtly affirm and celebrate eros whilst covertly denying its relational and generative power. The courtiers of Navarre, whilst being experts in the ‘semantics’ of eros, all fail to respond when their own relationships and the world around them require of them a genuine erotic engagement. Shakespeare thus portrays a situation where eros, language and education are all divided, and suggests that a superficial appropriation of desire results in a concept of education which is overly learner‐centred and avoids relationality and a genuine engagement with the world. Only through this authentic engagement, the play suggests, do eros and education genuinely belong together.
This article presents a theological–literary response to a concern in contemporary theory with heeding and articulating the speech of nonhuman things. Drawing from Rowan Williams’ metaphysics of poetic addition, I argue that an ‘ecotheological’ literary practice challenges us to become attentive and responsive to the language of the nonhuman, by creatively performing the co-mingling of nonhuman and human language. Drawing from Jean-Louis Chrétien’s phenomenology of the voice, I propose a theological conception of language as a gift of hospitality to the voice of nonhuman things that is also a gift of poetic addition—a ‘saying more’ which, adding being to the world, also manifests its gift-like nature. In contrast to recent critical approaches, I argue for the qualified retrieval of ‘nature’ as a figure both literary and theological, a voice that gives voice to things and speaks by means of human literary production. Through a reading of Shakespeare’s King Lear, I show that the paradoxical and poetic ambiguities of the literary sense of ‘nature’ serve precisely to shed light on its suspect modern iteration, while at the same time taking us beyond critique to enable a cautious yet attentive retrieval of its poetic and symbolic scope.
This essay challenges the assumption that ‘theology and literature’ deals with two sealed off orders of words, the former establishing a doctrinal ground to which the latter provides merely comparative or corroborative material. It argues instead that language itself, understood as a theological phenomenon, provides the ground through which these two disciplines coincide. This phenomenon can be encountered through a doxological reading of literature, in which the original presence of the Word in words can be encountered as a gift which calls for counter‐gifts. Looking at recent forays into Shakespeare criticism that engages with theology, I argue that a ‘secular’ conception of language prevents readers from encountering this theological phenomenon in the play. Through Oliver‐Thomas Venard's theological reading of Rimbaud, I show that even fiercely secular poetry seems inhabited by a call to recover a connection between words, world and the transcendent. Drawing on Nicholas of Cusa to argue that this connection is ultimately found in doxology, I conclude with a reading of King Lear which, both epitomising and supplementing this approach, shows that the play is inhabited by a call to find once again the profound connection between word and gift, and thus world and God.
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