“The Language of Divinity: Modernity and the Deep Past” Lecture Series: “Sacramental Poetics” with Regina Schwartz
The Program in Scripture and the Arts is proud to announce its three-part lecture series for 2014-2015, The Language of Divinity: Modernity and the Deep Past. The first speaker in this series will be Pulitzer prize nominee Regina Schwartz, Professor of English at Northwestern University, who will deliver a lecture at BU entitled “Sacramental Poetics” on October 14. This lecture will explore how the impulses that inform ritual can govern poetry. How, for instance, can the spiritual cravings for communion with Divinity addressed by the Christian sacrament of the Eucharist be expressed in verse? Surely as sign-making characterizes the Eucharist, is also does poetry, which is similarly engaged in making present what is absent–not just in select figures of speech, like the apostrophe, but in the very poetic enterprise. What is the sacramental character of language and how does it inflect communication?
When: Tuesday, October 14, 2014, 6 pm lecture with reception to follow
Location:147 Bay State Road, Elie Wiesel Center for Judaic Studies, 2nd floor board room (Room 201)
From the Northwestern University English Department Faculty page:
“Regina Schwartz (Ph.D. University of Virginia) teaches seventeeth-century literature, especially Milton; Hebrew Bible; philosophy and literature, law and literature, and religion and literature. Her publications include Remembering and Repeating: Biblical Creation in Paradise Lost (1988), which won the James Holly Hanford prize for the best book on Milton; The Book and the Text: The Bible and Literary Theory (1990); Desire in the Renaissance: Psychoanalysis and Literature (1994); The Postmodern Bible (1995) and Transcendence: Philosophy, Literature, and Theology Approach the Beyond (2004). The Curse of Cain: The Violent Legacy of Monotheism (1997), a study of identity and violence in the Hebrew Bible, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Her most recent book, Sacramentality at the Dawn of Secularism: When God Left the World, is published by Stanford in their series “Cultural Memory in the Present” (2007).
She has served as President of the Milton Society of America, Chair of the Modern Language Association Religion and Literature Division and Chair of Northwestern’s Interdisciplinary Hiring Initiative in the Humanities. Her recent speaking engagements include featured speaker at the Adelaide Festival of Ideas, the Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs, and international conferences on “Ontology,” “The Place of Theology in the Liberal State and Global Setting,” and “Derrida and Religion.” Her recent essays on postmodern theology appear in Post-secular Philosophy, Questioning God, and Transcendence; on Milton and Renaissance literature in The Blackwell Companion to Milton and The Journal of Religion and Literature; and on Shakespeare and Law in Triquarterly.”