Ineffability: Naming the Unnamable from Dante to Beckett

by Peter S. Hawkins

The essays in this volume explore the persistent struggle of language to overcome its own limitations. Given their scope-from Dante's confrontation with the divine All to Samuel Beckett's obsessive need to speak in the face of Nothing-they expand our notion of the extent to which all speech is an assault on silence, an attempt to articulate what lies beyond the grasp of words. The collection offers the reader, in roughly chronological order, diverse conceptions of the ineffable as either superfluity or absence of reality. It also exposes language in the act of extending its own boundaries, drawing attention to those literary tactics by which speech attempts to suggest what cannot be said. While largely a study of poetry, from medieval to modern, the volume also touches upon drama and a variety of prose, combining close textual readings with broader thematic discussions.

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1983

About the author

Professor Hawkins’ work has long centered on Dante, most recently in Dante’s Testaments: Essays on Scriptural Imagination (winner of a 2001 AAR Book Prize), The Poets’ Dante: Twentieth-Century Reflections (2001), co-edited with Rachel Jacoff, and Dante: A Brief History (2006). The poet features as well in his expansion of his 2007 Beecher Lectures on Preaching in Undiscovered Country: Imagining the World to Come (2009). His research in the history of biblical reception has led to three co-edited volumes to which he also contributed essays, Scrolls of Love: Ruth and the Song of Songs (2006), Medieval Readings of Romans (2007), and From the Margin I: Women of the Hebrew Bible and their Afterlives (2009). Together with Paula Carlson he has edited the Augsburg Fortress four-volume series, Listening for God: Contemporary Literature and the Life of Faith. He has also written on twentieth-century fiction (The Language of Grace), utopia (Getting Nowhere), and the language of ineffability (Naming the Unnamable from Dante to Beckett). Professor Hawkins’ essays have dealt with such topics as memory and memorials, televangelism, scriptural interpretation, and preaching. He writes regularly for The Christian Century’s ”Living by the Word” column and has work forthcoming in Religion and Literature, Modern Language Notes and The Yale Review. From 2000 to 2008 he directed the Luce Program in Scripture and Literary Arts at Boston University. While at BU he won the Metcalf Prize for Excellence in Teaching. He has served on the editorial boards of PMLA and Christianity and Literature and on the selection committee both of the Luce Fellows in Theology and of the Dante Society of America.