Date/Time
Date(s) - 25 Mar 2013
5:15 PM - 6:30 PM
Location
Martin and Margy Meyerson Conference Room, 2nd floor Van Pelt Library
Category(ies) No Categories
James Kearney (UC-Santa Barbara), whose talk is entitled “Smelling the Gospel.” Jim writes:
“In Reformation thought, the experience of scripture was understood to be properly transformative; the individual encountering scripture – read or preached – must give him- or herself over to the sacred text. And a transformative experience of scripture is at the heart of the multitude of conversion narratives in the early modern period. These conversion narratives took a variety of forms, but one of the most widespread and influential versions of the narrative was what I am calling the readerly or textual conversion, a transformation resulting from the reading of scripture. In this workshop I explore a particular version of textual conversion in which the reader in question describes his or her momentous experiences of scripture in explicitly sensory and somatic terms. In a sermon preached in 1552, for instance, Hugh Latimer contends that from the moment of his conversion “I began to smell the word of God.” Early reformers, it turns out, were fond of the conceit that one could smell or taste the gospel.
“In this workshop, I address readerly conversion as an experience that might offer insight into the historically-conditioned apprehension of text. This is part of a nascent research project addressing transformative reading in early modern England. My hope for this seminar is to explore questions about what evidence of this kind can tell us about reading experience. What does it mean to smell or taste text? Does the notion, however figurative, of an affective or somatic response to a sacred text describe or solicit a particular kind of reading experience?
Jim Kearney is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara and is the author of The Incarnate Text: Imagining the Book in Reformation England (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009). He recently co-edited a special issue of the journal Criticism addressing “Shakespeare and Phenomenology” (Summer, 2012). He is currently working on two research projects: one that addresses transformative reading in early modern England and one that addresses ethics and economics in Shakespeare’s plays.