Literature, Theology and the Arts at Glasgow

Oct 3rd –Alana Vincent, ‘Love and Monsters: Gender and Autonomy in Modern Golem Literature’

Oct 10th – John Butt, ‘Bach and the Dance of God - or Humankind?’ 

Oct 31st – Jonah Coman and Anna Fisk 

Nov 15th Vittorio Montemaggi ‘Love in Dante'

31st January      Sue Brind and Jim Harold (The Glasgow School of Art) Room 203, 4 University Gardens

“Art: Enactment, Presence and Prophecy”

Art is the only twin life has ... art does not seek to describe but to enact (Charles Olson). In his essay, Human Universe (1950-51), on the real work of poetry the early C20^th American poet, Charles Olson, sought to question convention and the received rhetorical structures of poetry; to, in effect, ‘wild’ language and thereby return to it the immediacy of experience, process and change. By so doing he conceived human creativity as acting empathetically within the wild energy of the Cosmos. Olson’s term ‘to enact’ is analysed alongside Jean-François Lyotard’s formulations on art, specifically those made in the essay, ‘Scapeland’ (1989), in the terms of the event and the figural as indicators of a re-wilding of meaning freed from society’s grand narratives. Referencing Maurice Blanchot’s essay, ‘The “Sacred” speech of Hölderlin’ (1949), consideration is also given to the poet-artist as prophet. Using the example of Hölderlin’s last poems, prophetic language unfolds to a point where to enact finds a natural conclusion in the poet’s non-being. In this paper, art practice, creative writing, and theoretical analysis are interwoven to establish a new metaphysics of enactment amongst complex social, political and cultural contemporary narratives. 

21^st February     Elizabeth Anderson (University of Aberdeen)

“‘Joy of Undeep and Unabiding Things’: The Domestic Sublime in Virginia Woolf and Gwendolyn Brooks”

This paper is part of a larger project on material spirituality in modernist women’s writing. For these writers, things mobilise creativity, traverse domestic, public and wild space and stage the interaction between the numinous and the mundane. In this paper I consider the spiritual life of things and how they create a domestic sublime in the work of Virginia Woolf and Gwendolyn Brooks.

In the tradition of negative theology, darkness and silence are frequently used to describe the divine as transcendent, unknowable and absent. Yet in Virginia Woolf’s novels darkness and silence are configured as located in the mundane, the material and presence. The uncanny strangeness of things within domestic space allows an exploration of material mysticism and its expression in Woolf’s writing. The paper than moves from analysis of the strange liveliness of the Ramsay house in To the Lighthouse to the liveliness of things in forming space and subjectivity in Gwendolyn Brooks’ novel, Maud Martha. I draw on bell hooks’ writing on black homeplace and aesthetics to analyse the way objects in Brooks’ novel testify to an occluded spirituality of the everyday. 

21^st March         Richard McLauchlan         

“Silence, the Arts, and Spiritual Discipline: Thoughts after R.S. Thomas”

R.S. Thomas’s poetry is intimately connected with silence. The first part of this paper suggests that a practice of ‘paschal reading’ can develop in the process of engagement with that silence. Such a practice can be understood as a form of spiritual discipline, insofar as it transforms and purifies the reader’s own relationship with, and understanding of, theological language, suffering, hope, and prayer. But the notion of this discipline arises out of the reading itself; it is not artificially read onto it. The second part of the paper therefore asks whether similarly paschal disciplines can arise out of other forms of artistic explorations of silence, or whether it is poetry’s unique interplay between word and silence that alone affords such an engagement. The Tate Modern’s ‘Rothko Room’ offers an appropriate opportunity to ask this question in relation to a specific set of paintings, as they resonate significantly with the features of silence that we discover in Thomas’s poems. To consider this series in such a fashion is to unearth a number of challenges to the idea of engagement with the arts as spiritual discipline. Nevertheless, it will become clear that transformations of an authentically paschal nature are possible in this context, even if an examination of them unsettles the framework that had developed in reading Thomas’s poems. 

18^th April         David Jasper

"Theology and Spirituality in the Pastoral Tradition in English Poetry" 

Despite the Reformation and all the changes in the English church, including the current trend towards managerialism, since the late Middle Ages, poetry has sustained a consistent tradition of pastoral theology from Chaucer to the present day. This paper traces the history of this tradition from the Poor Parson of the Town of The Canterbury Tales - its qualities and enduring significance for theology and the Church.  

2^nd May           Scott Robertson (Scottish Episcopal Church)

"Walls and Dust: The Literary and Theological Subversion of Security"

In the face of what Charles Taylor calls “exclusivist humanism” (A Secular Age), the corresponding temptation to increased academic specialisation which builds separation upon separation between and within intellectual disciplines, and the, at times, rabid expression of political fence building, the relationship between theology and the arts finds itself once again the focus of much attention. This paper paradoxically/contrarily argues that such boundaries, such walls are in fact illusory – indeed that the particular relationship between theology and literature cannot but be a sympathetic and mutually supportive one. Reflecting upon both ancient and more recent artistic exploration, this paper seeks to trace the common fragile threads which serve to undermine any sense of artificial security – a security that oppresses rather than liberates. The subversive Gospel story of the woman caught in adultery (John 8: 1-11) is placed alongside Michael Marder’s philosophical reflections, to reveal that the common source of both binding and loosing, of wall building and breaking lies in the dust itself. As such, notions of security through separation are subverted in the face of a common awareness of fragility.

16^th May           Linden Bicket (University of Edinburgh)

'"The Knox-Ruined Nation"? Scottish Catholic Fiction in the Twentieth Century'

In the first poem of his debut collection, The Storm (1954), the Orcadian poet George Mackay Brown diagnosed Scotland as 'the Knox-ruined nation', that 'poet and saint / must rebuild with their passion.' Brown's determination to restore the artistically bereft nation to full creative health was at once controversial and defiant, but he was not alone in his highly negative view of modern Scotland's thwarted cultural and spiritual potential. This paper traces a history of anti-Calvinism, crypto-Catholicism, and literary conversion in twentieth-century Scottish literature. Rather than aggressive enemies, this paper proposes that Catholic and Protestant literary imaginations can be seen as mutually enriching sites of creative interaction and exchange.

27^th September

Dr Anna Fisk (Research Assistant in Literature, Theology and the Arts)

‘So You’ve Got Something Just For Yourself’: Knitting, Spirituality and Gender

Knitting is a popular activity in the 21^st century, experienced by many practitioners as personally, socially, and politically meaningful and transformative. This paper, based on qualitative research with knitters in central Scotland, explores contemporary knitting as implicit religion and spirituality in terms of wider patterns in religion and society. Firstly, there are echoes of religious community and identity found in the knitting subculture, which are discussed in reference to shifts in congregational modes of belonging. The paper then considers knitting as an expressive-therapeutic practice, part of the rise of subjective wellbeing culture and the phenomenon of spirituality. 

11^th October

Dr Francis Stewart (University of Stirling)

The Stranger in the Pit: The Curation of Women in the ‘Religion’ of Punk

As we mark the 40th anniversary of punk, there have been numerous events, from gigs, talks, exhibits, films, and books; including Joe Corre’s ‘stunt’ of burning memorabilia in protest of the continued commodification and corporatisation of punk. Missing from far too many of these events has been the voice and experiences of women, people of colour, and LGBTQI+ people. Previous examinations of different aspects of punk through an Implicit Religion framework have revealed the significance of the concept of intersectionality, Protestant understandings of the world and an individualised, deconstructive approach to 'faith', 'spirituality' and 'religion' that centres around live performances and activism. Further utilising the analytical tools of Implicit Religion this paper will explore the representation of gender and race within punk exhibits to demonstrate that they serve to render non-White, non-males as immaterial. In so doing they are rendered as strangers, spoken for and not conversed with.

Reading Week – colloquium Writing on the Walls: Literature and Theology for This World on Friday 27^th October

1^st November

Prof Vicky Gunn (The Glasgow School of Art)

Does St. Pelagia’s Gender Matter? The Limits of Theological History in the Face of Queer Bodies

This presentation will use visual imagery to challenge the limits of the inconceivable in theological history.  It explores the Late Antique Syrian saint, Pelagia, as an archetype of holiness’ ambiguities.  It notes that it is over the bodies of such characters which history and theology alike assert control.  In so doing, the presentation illustrates how these academic disciplines both shore-up and disrupt concepts of the unthinkable which embody forms of social injustice in relation to gender.

15^th November

 Dr Kimm Curran (School of Critical Studies)

Communities of Medieval Women Religious: Re-assessing Definitions of Gendered Landscapes

Female religious houses and their connected geography of settlement have often been defined as ‘liminal, marginal’—set apart from the world because of gender and difference. This paper will demonstrate how we need to think more carefully of classifying female religious houses, their settlement, foundations, and places as ‘gendered’. These widely connected landscapes were often defined by patronage, geography, time and the wider influence of monastic developments throughout the middle ages. The landscapes of women religious are therefore not entirely gendered. Actions of human beings, secular and religious and the interactions between each other, blur these boundaries of gender. These become contested, conflicted landscapes shaped by the very nature of location and/or patronage, and liminal. These were also sacred/religious landscapes as well as ones of power, authority and community. By making them gendered (seeing as female vs male) we may miss wider themes of how the spaces and places changed over time as well as how place often was a more important factor than gender.

29^th November

Dr Nina Enemark 

Recrossing the Ritual Bridge Back to Life: Jane Ellen Harrison’s Ritual Theory and Modernism in the Arts

This paper considers Harrison’s ritual theory of art as part of an intellectual, cultural and aesthetic zeitgeist occurring at the beginning of the 20^th century. While centred on ancient Greek culture and art, her specialism as a classicist, Harrison’s work is directly connected to her concerns with religion and art in her own time. Her theory posits ritual as the forgotten origin of art and theology and sees in the modern period a return to this source in both religion and art. I argue that her theory implies a particular aesthetic which speaks to key shifts happening concurrently across the arts in Europe and America, and that the scope of her theory, incorporating insights from a range of fields of study, makes it a useful and unique lens through which to contextualise and view important developments in the arts during this period.