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.” And when they raised their eyes there was no one but Jesus to be seen. 5 Notice the kind of light that characterizes the transfiguration. First, it emerges on, even within, Christ’s face and clothes; its source is not explicitly external. (Its source, in other words, is inseparable, for the senses, from these same clothes, from this same face.) Second, the voice that complements the scene—or, if you prefer, that turns the tables on its apparent oculocentrism—comes from what this translation calls a bright cloud. All I have to say, here and elsewhere, might
This book explores, through medieval literature, modern poetry, and theologies both medieval and modern, the ways in which bodies, very much including literary bodies, may become apparent as more than they at first had seemed. Transfiguration, traditionally understood as the revelation of divinity in community, becomes for this book a figure for those splendours, mundane as much as divine, that wait within the read, lived, and loved world. The riddle of the body, which is to say the deep and superficial mystery of its pleasures and complications, invites a kind of patience, as medieval and modern languages reach toward, and break away from, something at their deepest centre and on their barest surface. By bringing together medieval sources with lyric medievalism, this book argues for the porousness of time and flesh. In this way, Augustine, Cassian, Bernard of Clairvaux, Dante, Boccaccio, and the heroes of Old French narrative, no more or less than their modern lyric counterparts, come to light in new and newly complicated ways. They become, in a word, transfigured.
, for a living or at our leisure, cannot get rid of this question. Each word disappears as it swells, at least if we allow it to carry us away, at least if we ride its breaks into the shallow surf of the end of the sentence, the end of the line. I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know. I am, however, inviting you to linger with this knowledge, to find the unknowing that incompletes it. If transfiguration means anything, this is one thing it could mean: a light that makes something newly visible, even as it appears to disappear; a light that burnishes the
loveliness of the moment. In the two above examples, the narrative grotesque is distilled into a crystallised moment of rupture and fusion at the level of the body and at the level of narrative. By means of this narrative grotesque both poets present new ways of perceiving and constructing eloquence in poetry. Hybridisation is deeply connected in both narratives with transfiguration and violence. Douglas’s dreamer is continuously worried about the integrity of his body; his embodiment of his psychological fears as well as
silenced and wounded body of the colonised is a pervasive figure in colonial and postcolonial discourses, although its valencies obviously shift with the transition from colonial into postcolonial history. In the postcolonial process of rewriting, certainly, the trope of the dumb, oppressed body undergoes significant translations or transfigurations, which this chapter will examine in closer detail. In Maru (1971), a novelistic indictment of intra-black racism, the South African writer Bessie Head stakes out a number of epigraphic moments with which to begin the discussion
territory more cultural than physical, subject to transfigurations wrought by a sophisticated intellectual who viewed the world through the lens of his sensibilities. The paths of this itinerary also intersect with the Italy of Pier Paolo Pasolini in the guise of an imagined ancient world irreparably destroyed by industrialization and consumerism. In undertaking such journeys, I have embraced the point of view
studies – Ernst Toller’s expressionist drama Die Wandlung (The Transfiguration, 1919) and Karl Kraus’s documentary drama Die letzten Tage der Menschheit (The Last Days of Mankind, 1922) – for the same reason. To my knowledge, these plays have not been linked before. They do not share a common aesthetic or style, though the end of Act 5 of Kraus’s play, which is my focus, has an expressionist bent and so connects to The Transfiguration. However, all three plays involve fantastical representations of death that outline the enormity of the conflict and its challenge to
Pek dancing Goh ( 2009 ) proposed that transfiguration brought about by political, economic and cultural forces may radically reshape the “Materiality of everyday life and existential order that lies at the basis of Chinese religious beliefs and practices” (Goh, 2009 : 113). The ethnography illustrates this in the recent transfiguration of behavioural norms, conveyed through the reconfiguration of pantheonic hierarchies largely expressed in new, intoxicant-based ritual practices, both factors conflicting with the
transformative messages of the dream, namely that the poet has a divine task not only in elevating himself as an individual but also in fulfilling his intermediary role as custodian and conveyer of history and (divinely inspired) knowledge. The effect of this complex rendering of identity and narrative voice is partly played out through the prevailing themes of fate and transfiguration. The dreamer’s existential angst over his fatall weird (fated destiny) is the principal cause of the vision and thus acts as the source
: ‘“even soused over head and ears” in their sins, in “many foolish and noisome lusts, which drown men in perdition”’. 22 3. A third epiphany is Jesus’ Transfiguration , when Peter, James, and John saw fully his spiritual being 23 yet were unable to interpret or to participate in that glory. Transfiguration epiphanies figure prominently in