October 28, 2004
Dear Colleague,
Thank you for your inquiry about the NEH Summer Seminar (“Religious Experience and English Poetry, 1633-1985”) to be held at the University of Notre Dame from June 20 to July 22, 2005. This letter, along with the NEH document “Application Information and Instructions,” should answer most of your questions about what promises to be a rich and rewarding five weeks.
Interdisciplinary in scope, the seminar will seek to read major works by four canonical English poets noted for their religious verse (George Herbert, Gerard Manley Hopkins, T. S. Eliot and Geoffrey Hill). I’ve chosen these four partly because of the richness of their writing and partly because they form a unity: Hopkins was influenced by Herbert’s poems, Eliot wrote on Herbert, and Hill has commented on Hopkins and Eliot. We will read, very closely, a small number of poems by each writer, approaching them from a variety of perspectives that can be summarized by the word “experience.” Several questions to do with experience have been often raised with respect to religious poetry. Is there such a thing as “religious experience” and, if so, how does it differ from other experience? Do we derive meaning (of a religious kind) from particular experiences, as liberals tend to argue? Or do we derive meaning from doctrine and use that to interpret experience, as traditionalists tend to argue? Either way, we need to account for gaps between experience and meaning (a major concern, in different ways, for all four poets).
We will also pose some new questions that have arisen from provocative contemporary work in the philosophy of religion and theology. The thinkers I have in mind are the Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, and two French phenomenologists: Jean-Luc Marion and Jean-Louis Chrétien. All three figures are intensely discussed in philosophy and theology but not yet in literary criticism — and yet they might help us to read religious poems more surely than many other thinkers who are discussed in literary criticism. All three thinkers prompt us to ask in what ways philosophical and theological reflection sharpens our reading of poems, especially those that are also prayers. Balthasar develops a theological aesthetics of considerable reach and sophistication based on beauty rather than the sublime. Can it be used concretely to read some or all of the four poets? Chrétien invites us to consider prayer in terms of a poetics of “call and response” and to think of prayer as “wounded speech.” Are these helpful and productive invitations? Marion has argued for what he calls “counter-experience,” which occurs when one encounters a phenomenon that does not offer itself to experience. The notion requires us to think long and hard about the cherished category of “religious experience.” Could it be that the very idea of religious experience makes us systematically misread religious poetry? These questions will give you an idea of how the seminar might stretch how we think about Herbert, Hopkins, Eliot and Hill.
We will begin by raising and clarifying the central concerns that will be explored more thoroughly in the weeks ahead. The expression “religious poetry” has not had a happy history; it has been deemed either self-contradictory or pleonastic. Our best chance of rethinking religious poetry in a fresh manner is to see, before going very far, how it has been framed in our tradition. To that end, we will examine remarks on the topic by Samuel Johnson, T. S. Eliot and Harold Bloom. Adopting a long perspective, we will also look back to debates in the eighth and ninth centuries between iconoclasts and anti-iconoclasts and see how these inform contemporary discussion of art. We will then consider the poets in historical order, while remaining open to connections between the four. Several lyrics from The Temple will be studied, followed by Hopkins’s “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” which in turn will be followed by Eliot’s Four Quartets, and finally we will turn our attention to Hill’s sonnet sequence “Lachrimæ.” Each poet’s work will be viewed from new perspectives offered by contemporary thinkers who are not usually cited by literary critics, and no one perspective will dominate discussion. Herbert’s poems will be read in conjunction with Chrétien’s essay “Wounded Speech”; Hopkins’s long poem will be studied with the help of Balthasar’s theological aesthetics; Eliot’s Four Quartets will be read with recent work (some of it unpublished) by Marion on “saturated phenomena” and “counter experience,” which will also inform our reading of Hill’s sonnets.
As Director of the seminar, I will guide each week’s discussions and meet individually with all participants at least twice. I will be available in the afternoons Monday, Tuesday and Thursday (as well as all day Wednesday) to talk with small groups and individuals. The visiting faculty will also be happy to meet with individuals and small groups. I have been teaching religious poetry since I came to Notre Dame in the Fall of 2002, and have been deeply interested in the work of Balthasar, Marion and Chrétian for many years. You might be familiar with my early study The Trespass of the Sign (Cambridge UP) or with a recent book such as The Dark Gaze (Chicago UP). Or you might have read some of my essays on poetry and poetics. I approach the seminar with the firm belief that all discussion should be based in a close reading of particular texts. Our seminar will have two foci: close reading of poems, and questions raised by philosophical and theological essays. The aim is not to repeat old thought but to see how “religious poetry” can be seen in a new light.
I am delighted to tell you that the seminar will have three visiting faculty who are eminent in their fields. Regina Schwartz (English, Northwestern University) will help us in our reading of Herbert, and will share some of her forthcoming book on the Eucharist in seventeenth-century poetry, Real Hunger. Cyril O’Regan (Theology, University of Notre Dame) will help to guide us through the theological aesthetics of Hans Urs von Balthasar, and will share material from his forthcoming two-volume commentary on the theologian. Henry Hart (English, College of William and Mary) was one of the first critics to write at length on Hill’s poetry, and his remarks on Hill will be deepened by his recent work on modern poetry and mysticism. Participants will have ample opportunity to talk with Visiting Faculty outside the seminar.
I hope that participants will bring a variety of disciplinary backgrounds to the seminar. If there are literary critics, theologians and scholars of religion around the table, the chances are that our discussions will be all the more illuminating. Some participants will have published on one or more of the poets; others will have taught religious poetry at undergraduate or graduate level; while still others will come with a developed interest in Balthasar, Marion or Chrétien.
We will meet for a three-hour seminar three mornings a week (Monday, Tuesday and Thursday). Study rooms in the Hesburgh Library will be made available for small groups who wish to continue discussion in the afternoons, either with or without the Director and visiting faculty. All participants are encouraged to work on an individual project over the summer: an article, a chapter of a book, or a contribution to curriculum development. Opportunities to report on this work in progress will be made available in the morning meetings. I would like applicants to signal their research interest in their application so that those who wish to work on Herbert and Hopkins can give reports earlier rather than later in the seminar. I would like the reports to be tied to the subject matter of particular meetings of the seminar and, so far as possible, distributed evenly over the five weeks. In this way our discussions and reports will form a whole.
The University of Notre Dame offers a wide range of resources for visiting scholars. We have rich holdings in Catholic religion and philosophy, and the Medieval Institute Library and the Byzantine Collection are outstanding collections. An introduction to the Hesburgh Library will take place on the first day of the seminar. Participants are encouraged to view the “virtual exhibit” of rare books relating to the four poets held by the Hesburgh Library. It will be a feature of the seminar website, which will also include information about all the writers to be discussed, an introduction to the visiting faculty, and information about the NEH. Among other things, the Hesburgh Library holds a 1678 edition of Herbert’s The Temple and first editions of several books by the four poets. The virtual exhibit will enable participants to establish, before arriving on campus, which items they would like to use in the Library. Participants will be granted the status of visiting scholars and, as such, will be able to use internet and email facilities on the first and second floors of the Hesburgh Library and, of course will have borrowing privileges at the Library and an internet account. In the summer the Library Building is open Monday through Friday from 7.30 am to 2.00 am, Saturday from 9.00 am to 2.00 am, and Sunday from 10.00 am to 2.00 am. Computer clusters are also available elsewhere on campus, including the basement of La Fortune, the student cafeteria, where participants can also find a variety of food outlets, hairdressers, and an ATM.
Housing will be available at Notre Dame for the duration of the seminar. We have reserved fifteen air-conditioned rooms in one of the university dormitories for the participants from Friday, June 17 though to Friday, July 22, 2005. Each room comes with twin beds. Linens are provided and linen service is provided twice weekly. For single occupancy, the cost in the summer of 2005 is anticipated to be $40 a night per person. For double occupancy, the rate is anticipated to be $29 for each person per night. (The university will help any participants who wish to find outside accommodation.) The university provides free parking space for visiting faculty. Participants can have meals at several venues on campus and will have the option of purchasing meal and beverage cards, which will allow them to eat at any of Notre Dame’s dining halls, coffee shops or restaurants, or to purchase a meal plan at one of the dining halls. Anticipated rates for the latter are as follows: breakfast, $8.50; lunch, $12.00; and dinner, $14.50. The stipend for the seminar is $3, 600.
The grounds at Notre Dame are beautiful and serene in the summer, and the university offers a range of recreational activities, including tennis and squash courts, swimming pools, and eighteen-hole golf course, boating, gym facilities, and cycling and running paths. A fine art collection is maintained at the Snite Museum. Participants can easily go to Chicago for the evening or spend a relaxing evening at one of the towns on the east side of Lake Michigan.
Your completed application should be postmarked no later than March 1, 2005, and should be addressed as follows: Professor Kevin Hart, Department of English, The University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN, 46556. Perhaps the most important part of the application is the essay that must be submitted as part of the complete application. This essay should include any personal and academic information that is relevant: reasons for applying to the seminar; your interest, both intellectual and personal, in the topic; qualifications to do the work of the project and make a contribution to it; what you hope to accomplish by participation, including individual research and writing projects; and the relation of the study to your teaching.
If you have any further questions to do with staying at Notre Dame over the summer, please contact my program assistant Mr Scott Moringiello (smoringi@nd.edu). Any questions regarding content should be addressed to me: khart2@nd.edu.
Yours faithfully,
Kevin Hart, FAHA
Professor of English