No 4 (2015)
Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://gupea-staging.ub.gu.se/handle/2077/80627
Consolation – literary and religious perspectives
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Item Shared Experience – Shared Consolation? Fictional Perspective-Taking and Existential Stances in Literature(LIR. journal, 2015) Petterson, TorstenThis paper suggests some ways in which the concerns of existential psychotherapy may be combined with the practice of poetry therapy. It emphasizes the capacity of literature for inducing perspective-taking, i.e. the reader’s opportunity of experiencing the ongoing here and now of a fictional character, including the speaker of a poem. It goes on to show this process in action in four poems exemplifying, respectively, four different attitudes to the existential question of meaning and purpose in life: transcendental-optimistic (Erik Gustaf Geijer’s »Natthimmelen« / »The Night Sky«); transcendental-pessimistic (A.E. Housman’s »The Laws of God«); immanent-optimistic (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s »A Hymn to the Night«); and immanent-pessimistic (Tennyson’s »Oh Yet We Trust«). Whatever the stance of the poems, the reader grappling with existential questions may take the perspective of the speakers of the poems, thereby finding solace in a shared experience of the human condition.Item The Consolation of Pirandello’s Green Blanket and an Autistic Theology(LIR. journal, 2015) Dunster, RuthLuigi Pirandello’s 1926 novel One, No One and One Hundred Thousand depicts its protagonist Vitangelo Moscarda as a troubled, introspective searcher for reality. Moscarda finds ultimate salvation though a mystical experience emanating from his contemplation of a green blanket. This paper performs a reading of Pirandello’s novel through a lens where Moscarda’s journey is a deeply theological one, and how his ultimate madness is in fact a place of consolation and rebirth. It becomes an autistic theology when its problematic stance towards relationships is taken into account, and the comfort of Moscarda’s ultimate consolation becomes an acceptance of the space where a mystical theology might resonate with a theology of autistic Mindblindness, namely, the ultimate failure of human knowledge and communion.Item The Consolation of Things: Domestic Objects in H.D.’s Writing from the Second World War(LIR. journal, 2015) Anderson, ElizabethThis paper analyses the spiritual consolation of domestic objects – Christmas decorations, food, flowers – in the writing of the American writer H.D. The paper asks how H.D.’s engagement with crafting material things formed a spiritual response to the time of crisis in which she wrote her mature poetry and prose. The paper analyses the prose texts The Gift and » Writing on the Wall« as well as the poem »Christmas 1944« whilst also drawing upon archival research into H.D.’s letters of the period as intertexts for the autobiographical writing. The French theorist Hélène Cixous’s writing on the gift forms a framework for considering gift exchange amongst H.D.’s friends as a process of crafting community in the face of trauma. In H.D.’s work ordinary things become extraordinary and create pathways towards healing and consolation.Item A Quantum of Solace and Heap of Doubt(LIR. journal, 2015) Reinhold Bråkenhielm, CarlThe article examines two lines of reasoning for consolation on the basis of a religious belief about life after death. The first line departs from the presumed consoling power of such a belief (summarized in the »factory-girl« argument of John Henry Newman). According to Richard Dawkins and John Stuart Mill, this pragmatic line of reasoning is wholly irrelevant when it comes to the question whether it is rational or not to entertain such a belief. The second line of reasoning has to do with epistemic arguments for beliefs in a life after death. John Stuart Mill has certain arguments for the claim that it is rational to entertain such a belief. One of them is based on his specific form of theism. But is it possible to believe that the theistic Creator desires our good? I argue that it is possible even in the face of horrendous evil providing that a certain comprehensive fundamental pattern is chosen. I call this pattern »a theology of waiting«. God is revealed in the world but only in an unpredictable and ambiguous way. Such a theology of waiting is beyond the objective canons of science and logic. In sum, religious belief provides consolation conjoined with an ineradicable quantum of doubt.Item The Consolation of Everyday Things(LIR. journal, 2015) Walton, HeatherThis article begins by outlining some of the ways in which objects have been understood to have consolatory functions in Western culture. It then explores how a recent shift in thinking about things is emerging both within academic discourse and in popular works of creative none-fiction such as Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking and Edmund de Waala’s The Hare with the Amber Eyes. This new materialist thinking offers the potential to challenge accepted understandings of the consolation to be found in human/thing relations. This potential is explored with particular reference to Etty Hillesum’s war-time journals which place the consolation of things in a challenging and creative theological frame.Item On the Deathbed: Margaret Cavendish on What to Say in Times of Grief(LIR. journal, 2015) Rosengren, CeciliaThe article highlights a couple of fictitious speeches of dying persons, written by the 17th century philosopher, dramatist and author Margaret Cavendish. The speeches are included in her book Orations of Divers Sorts, Accomodated to Divers Places (1662), in which early modern society is displayed in various rhetorical situations. In the introduction Cavendish invites the reader on a tour through a metropolitan city, while eavesdropping on people talking. Her book is in a way a theatrical staging, which fits well with the Renaissance metaphor of »theatrum mundum«. Relating Cavendish’s intervention on this stage to early modern philosophical discussions on emotions and to the rhetorical genre as such, the article discusses how Cavendish conceived of the concepts of grief and comfort in her age.Item Consolation as Graced Encounters with Ignatius of Loyola and Hélène Cixous(LIR. journal, 2015) Reek, JenniferThis article suggests that the sixteenth-century Basque saint Ignatius of Loyola and the French thinker Hélène Cixous experienced consolation in unexpected encounters with texts. For Ignatius, consolation came as a result of reading while recovering from a battle wound in 1521 the only texts available to him, of lives of the saints and Christ. For Cixous, it was the consoling birth of her writing life after the death of her father in 1948 and 30 years later a chance reading of the Brazilian novelist Clarice Lispector. These encounters serve here as a point of departure into a beginning exploration of reading and writing as consolation in the work and life of these two disparate yet essentially compatible figures. Taking a cue from Cixous’s reading and writing practices, personal criticism is used in the reading of their texts so that the writing of this essay may itself perform an act of consoling.Item Consolation and Empathy in the Religious Worldview of Tomas Tranströmer(LIR. journal, 2015) Olofsson, StaffanThe poems of the Nobel laureate Tomas Tranströmer has an introspective quality which alternates intangible between things and events from the exterior world and events from man’s inner life. He constantly delves on what it means to be a human being in the world of today and regards insight into spiritual aspects of life as a survival strategy for man, on an individual as well as on a collective level, and something that brings true consolation. In the poetical world of Tranströmer humans are not only rational and social beings but also spiri tual and existential beings, and without the latter no authentic life exists. The emphasis in my presentation is on the performative force of Tranströmer’s poems for creating consolation and empathy, and the depiction of the religious worldview, conveyed by his poems. I have used the theory of the structuralist semiotician Michael Riffaterre as my main theoretical perspective complemented by the »I and it-relationship« and »I and yourelationship « outlined by the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber. I have concretized my study by interpretations of selected poems. The most innovative part of my presentation is a novel interpretation of the poem Romanesque Arches based on the presuppositions given above.Item Stoicism and Consolation(LIR. journal, 2015) Lindberg, BoIn this essay, Stoic consolation is presented by help of Seneca and his treatises on consolation addressed to two women, his mother Helvia and his relative Marcia. Consolation according to Seneca consists in arguments taken from the rhetorical genre of consolation embedded in Stoic philosophy. By excluding the passions and effects from the philosophical soul, by criticizing conventional opinion of what is important in life, and by accepting determinism, Stoic consolation aimed at preventing grief from invading the mind of the mourner. It was a proactive strategy, preparing the soul for hardship rather than mitigating grief after misfortune has hit the individual. In theory, the Stoic would be in no need of consolation. In practice, however, as in the cases of Helvia and Marcia, the consolatory arguments are applied after the calamity. Stoic consolation differs from Christian consolation in that the category of hope is excluded. Since affects are ruled out, compassion and pity on the part of the consoler are excluded as well. Stern and severe, Stoicism has not made itself popular in history; however, Stoic arguments are recognized in modern coach literature, where »acceptance«, focus on the present, »carpe diem«, and mindfulness are current prestige words.Item Consolation in Christian Heinrich Postel’s Biblical Opera Libretto(LIR. journal, 2015) Hedman, DagThis essay discusses the prominence of the consolation theme in Christian Heinrich Postel’s biblical opera libretto Cain und Abel Oder Der verzweifelnde Bruder=Mörder (Hamburg, 1689). It is shown that in this drama the theme is relevant not only to the persons in the drama, but to the audience as well. This result stands in contrast to earlier research, which incorrectly has pointed out different other subjects as the main themes of the opera.Item Consolation and Psychoanalysis(LIR. journal, 2015) Johansson, Per MagnusPsychoanalysis has seldom concerned itself with the notion of consolation at the theoretical level. Consolation (or comfort or solace) is not a psychoanalytic concept. Freud only uses the word once in his general reflections on the human condition. Freud saw religion as an effect of man’s infantile need for consolation, and compared it with obsessional neuroses. His reflections on the matter led Freud to the conclusion that religion is an illusion. The more people who gain access to thinking influenced by science, the more people will abandon their belief in the religious message. In Freud’s scientific-ideological attempt at turning psychoanalysis into a scientific discipline, phenomena which are parts of the religious and literary fields are lost. The human need for consolation is such a phenomenon. Donald W. Winnicott’s concept of the transitional object must be considered in this context. According to Winnicott, the transitional object is on the border between psychic, subjective reality, and external, objective reality. It is usually used by the child of the age of four to twelve months. The transitional object is a compensation which has the function of consoling the individual. In Sweden, as in many other European countries, the psychodynamic tradition that arose was to a greater extent concerned with fulfilling man’s need for consolation, as compared with pursuing an ideal that was influenced by the natural sciences. The psychotherapists in this tradition attended to man’s need for consolation, and the treatment was called pastoral cure.Item Consolations of a New Earth(LIR. journal, 2015) Cavallin, ClemensIn a marginalized group, personal suffering is inescapably united to excluding social and political structures and situations. To provide consolation to an individual then also involves showing a way of how the group can escape its painful predicament, which in early Christianity took the form of an end times confrontation between good and evil; and the emergence of new heavens and a new earth. In science fiction literature, a variant on this theme of cosmic regeneration is the escape to an earth-like planet with the help of an interstellar space ship. An interesting recent case of such an offer of consolation in outer space is the novel, Voyage to Alpha Centauri, by Michael O’Brien, a contemporary Canadian author. The story is a commentary on the marginalization of traditional, especially Catholic, Christianity, and the growing strength of a liberal secular order.Item Consolation of Literature as Rhetorical Tradition: Issues and Examples(LIR. journal, 2015) Agrell, BeataThis article investigates a tradition of consolation in order to explore rhetorical strategies and literary devices of consolatory texts. The aim is to elucidate how the view of consolation has varied through history and the impact of these variations on the motives for and the right to consolation. Issues dealt with are which sufferings that justified consolation, which kind of consolation that was accepted in an individual case, and which rhetorical means that were considered as appropriate. At first a theoretical and historical introduction will discuss the concept of consolation, its variants in tradition, and different states of mind considered in need of consolation. A special discussion concerns the condition of melancholy. Thereafter a few examples of consolatory rhetoric from various genres and historical periods will be analyzed, from Homer to Derrida.Item Editorial: Consolation – literary and religious perspectives(LIR. journal, 2015) Agrell, Beata; Möller, Håkan