English 302a	M. McInerney
M 7:30-10	HU III

Not all mystics are poets, nor are all poets mystics, but the overlap between the two is significant; both poetry and mystical writing concern themselves with problems of representation, with speaking the unspeakable, with mapping routes towards union with a transcendent other (God, Nature, the Beloved, Nothingness). Mystical writing suggests two possible paths towards such union; the via positiva or positive way is a mode of communication which lays claim to a degree (albeit always conditional) of authenticity and immediacy in describing contact between the human and the divine; the via negativa, with which we will concern ourselves more extensively, is a mode of language which insists upon its own impossibility, on its intimate relation with nothingness and absence. This second path is associated strongly (if not exclusively) with the writings of medieval and early modern female mystics, (Marguerite Porete, Julian of Norwich, Teresa of Avila) and with the critical/philosophical writings of many post-modern theorists (Kristeva, Irigaray, Bataille), but also manifests itself powerfully in the work of poets both male and female, from Shelley to Swinburne to Rossetti to Rimbaud, and in the work of post-modern novelists (like Robert Gluck, who reimagines Margery Kempe from a gay male perspective) and filmmakers (like David Cronenberg, for whom transcending the body is only possible by violating it). This course proposes to speak the unspeakable, to map the curious congruencies and disjunctions between mystical, aesthetic and philosophical modes of transcendence. Topics to be encountered on this journey into the void will include the problem of escaping the body; the association between the feminine and the mystical; the tendency of mystical thought and practice to reconfigure both sex and gender; modes for escaping the real, including sex (both homo- and hetero-), drugs, and sado-masochism; and a consideration of the relationship of the mystical to history.

Warning: metaphysical malaise will be par for the course

Required texts will be selected from among the following:

Prose:

Pseudo-Dionysius, Mystical Theology; St Augustine, Confessions; Richard Rolle, The Prick of Love; Margery Kempe, The Book of Margery Kempe;Julian of Norwich, Showings; Thomas De Quincy, Suspiria de Profundis;; Sigmund Freud, from Beyond the Pleasure Principle; Luce Irigaray, "La Mystérique"; Helène Cixous, "Laugh of the Medusa"; Georges Bataille, from Erotisme; Julia Kristeva, "Powers of Horror"; Michel De Certeau, from The Mystic Fable; Angela Carter, Polemical Preface to the Sadeian Woman, Robert Gluck, Margery Kempe

Poetry:

Hildegard of Bingen, Symphonia; P. B. Shelley, "Mont Blanc" and "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty"; S.T. Coleridge, "The Eolian Harp", "Kubla Khan", "Christabel"; Christina Rossetti, "The Convent Threshold"; C.A. Swinburne. Poems and Ballads, Gerald Manley Hopkins, "God's Grandeur", "Windhover"; Arthur Rimbaud, "A Season in Hell"; William Butler Yeats, excerpts from The Rose, The Tower, and The Winding Stair and Other Poems; Wallace Stevens, from The Palm at the End of the Mind.

Other:

Excerpts from Mechthild of Magdeburg, Hadewijch of Brabant and Beatrijs of Nazareth; St John of the Cross, The Dark Night of the Soul; Marguerite Porete, The Mirror of Simple Souls; Kristeva,"Stabat Mater"; Yeats, from A Vision

Films:

Denys Arcand, Jesus of Montreal; David Cronenberg, Videodrome.

Requirements:

Class participation, oral report, several short writing assignments, and one 15-20 page critical essay.

Enrollment is limited to 15; Pre-requisites: Two 200 level English courses or consent of instructor. Satisfies pre-1800 requirement.

Cross-Listed with Comparative Literature and Feminist and Gender Studies