Book Project

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ABSTRACT: Twenty-one times in the Commedia, precisely seven times in each canticle, Dante halts the narrative in order to directly address the reader. In these addresses Dante— as Leo Spitzer hinted at in his classic article—seeks to become guide to the reader not merely in a general sense, but to guide in the same manner that Virgil guides him, passing on the content of Virgil’s ethical or spiritual teaching to his own readers. I argue in this paper that Dante’s addresses are reproducing for his reader not only Virgil’s spiritual pedagogical posture toward Dante, but also Virgil’s artistic pedagogical posture. Dante desires in his direct addresses to pass on to the reader the same lessons in creativity that Virgil passed to him. Understanding Dante's impetus toward artistic pedagogy is a missing exegetical tool for uncovering the unifying purpose of these addresses. When Dante turns to face his readers, he seeks not only to craft intimacy or to lend spiritual guidance; he seeks also to become a fonte which might allow a future lettore to emerge into a creative actor—and, in time, even a writer of poetry, one trained for composition within Dante’s ample wake.

ABSTRACT: After the English Reformation, St. Peter maintained an enormous presence in English imaginations. While Protestant theology rejected Peter's role as first Pope, it produced an array writing establishing Peter as an indispensable paradigm of true repentance. Catholic writers responded, sometimes doubling down on Peter's traditional role, sometimes incorporating the Protestant everyman figure into their own writings. In this paper, I demonstrate that in King Lear, Shakespeare enters the fray by modelling Edgar on the contemporaneous understanding of Peter, drawing heavily from both scripture and Robert Southwell's popular poem, Saint Peter's Complaint. Not only do the narrative arcs match—cowardly sin to tortured guilt to repentance and reinstatement—but dozens of specific images in Lear are drawn from and engage with the Petrine literature. I conclude the paper by exploring Shakespeare's previously unnoted allusion at the play's end: Edgar's three-fold repetition of "Lord" to the dead Lear near Dover Beach—an echo of Peter's three-fold confession of "Lord" by the Sea of Galilee. 

ABSTRACT: Criticism on Ron Hansen's Mariette in Ecstasy has, with little hesitation and only one exception, readily accepted the veracity of Mariette's stigmata. Hansen, however, claims to have written the novel to support both belief and unbelief. Employing the psychoanalytic and Foucauldian principles that Hansen's text seems to openly invite, this article demonstrates the subtle ways with which Hansen consistently provides alternative naturalistic explanation when depicting the supernatural. It argues that Hansen sows seeds of ambiguity not to produce doubt, but to offer a unique theological hermeneutics: he positions his text, as well as Mariette, as a stigmatic—willingly accepting the wounds of suspicious reading to create a more grace-infused sacramental text.