Religious triangulation of desire in Donne and Herbert
Abstract
The paper means to investigate the poetic rewritings of the traditional Imitatio Christi written by metaphysical poets John Donne (1572-1631) and George Herbert (1593-1633) during the religious crisis and the eucharistic debates still affecting English culture and society in the seventeenth century. To this aim, textual analyses are developed exploiting the hermeneutic possibilities offered by two ideas from René Girard’s theory of mimetic desire: the triangularity of desire and the Scapegoat mechanism as origin of sacrifice. This approach provides new insights into Donne’s Songs and Sonnets and George Herbert's The Temple, and namely the recurrence of religious triangulations in which Christ plays the role of "internal" mediator, arousing desires of replacement and rivalry. These triangulations ground on and allude to the lowering of Christ's divine figure caused by the religious crisis, and contextually reveal the desire to compensate, at least in the space of the poetical language, the threatened loss of his Real Presence.Downloads
References
Brooks, Cleanth, The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry, New York, Harcourt Brace, 1947.
Clements, Arthur L., Eros in the Songs and Sonnets, John Donne’s Poetry, New York, Norton&Company, 1966.
Culler, Jonathan, On Deconstruction. Theory and Criticism after Structuralism, New York, Cornell University, 1982.
Davies, Horton, Worship and Theology in England from Cranmer to Hooker 1534-1603, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1975, I.
Di Pasquale, Theresa M., Literature and Sacrament: the Sacred and the Secular in John Donne, Pittsburg, Duquesne University Press, 1999.
Donne, John, The Songs and Sonnets, ed. Robert T. H. Redpath, London, Metheun, 1967.
Donne, John, Poesie, Eds. Alessandro Serpieri, Silvia Bigliazzi, Milano, Rizzoli, 2007.
Eliot, Thomas Sterne, Selected Prose, Ed. Frank Kermode, New York, Harvest Books, 1975.
Fish, Stanley E., Self-Consuming Artifacts. The Experience of the Seventeenth-century Literature, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1972.
Gimelli Martin, Catherine, “Unmeete Contraryes: The Reformed Subject and the Triangulation of Religious Desire in Donne's Anniversaries and Holy Sonnets”, John Donne and the Protestant Reformation, Ed. Mary A. Papazian, Detroit, Wayne State Univ. Press, 2003.
Girard, René, Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque, Paris, Editions Bernard Grasset, 1961, trad. it. Struttura e personaggi nel romanzo moderno, poi come Menzogna romantica e verità romanzesca. Le mediazioni del desiderio nella letteratura e nella vita, Ed. Leonardo Verdi-Vighetti, Milano, Bompiani, 1965.
Girard, René, La violence et le sacré, Paris, Editions Bernard Grasset, 1972, trad. it. La violenza e il sacro, Eds. Ottavio Fatica, Eva Czerkl, Milano, Adelphi, 1980.
Girard, René, Shakespeare: les feux de l'envie, Paris, Editions Grasset & Fasquelle, 1990, trad. it. Shakespeare. Il teatro dell'invidia, Ed. Giovanni Luciani, Adelphi, Milano 1998.
Girard, René, Le bouc emissaire, Paris, Editions Bernard Grasset, 1982, trad. it. Il capro espiatorio, Adelphi, Milano 1987.
Girard, René, Il sacrificio, Milano, Raffaello Cortina, 2004.
Girard, René, Il pensiero rivale. Dialoghi su letteratura, filosofia e antropologia, Ed. Pierpaolo Antonello, Massa, Transeuropa, 2006.
Girard, René, Mimesis and Theory: Essays on Literature and Criticism, 1953-2005, Ed. Robert Doran, Stanford University Press, 2008.
Harman, Barbara Leah, Costly Monuments: Representation of the Self in George Herbert’s Poetry, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1982.
Herbert, George, The English Poems of George Herbert, Ed. Helen Wilcox, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Lewalski, Barbara, Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-century Religious Lyric, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1979.
Netzley, Ryan, Reading, Desire and the Eucharist in Early Modern Religious Poetry, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2011.
Rufini, Sergio, “L’enigma della fenice: simbolismo numerico e organizzazione spaziale in ‘The Canonization’”, Annali Università di Perugia, XII (1975).
Schoenfeldt Michael, “‘That Spectacle of too much weight’: The Poetics of Sacrifice in Donne, Herbert, Milton”, The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, XXXI:3 (2001).
Schwartz, Regina M., Sacramental Poetics at the Dawn of Secularism: When God Left the World, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2008.
Serpieri, Alessandro, “Sull’uso del modello comunicativo nella poesia di John Donne: ‘The Funerall’ e ‘The Relique’”, Strumenti Critici, IX (1975).
Todd, Richard, The Opacity of Signs: Acts of Interpretation in George Herbert’s The Temple, Missouri, University of Missouri Press, 1986.
Young, Robert V., Doctrine and Devotion in the 17th Century Poetry: Studies in Donne, Herbert, Crashaw and Vaughan, Woodbridge, D.S. Brewer, 2000.
Whalen, Robert, Poetry of Immanence: Sacrament in Donne and Herbert, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2002.
Copyright Notice
You are free to copy, distribute and transmit the work, and to adapt the work. You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).
