Words Made Flesh: Embodying the “Correspondent Subjective” within Religion and Literature

This talk explores the implications of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s view that both scripture and literature can serve as mediums that deeply affect and orient readers’ postures of attention and their ways of navigating within a wider world of concern. Critiquing the bibliolatrous, Coleridge advocates for a projective method of reading that enables reciprocal exchange, one where subjective experience becomes objectively available through its correspondence with the figures of Scripture, and where objective truths can become subjectively realized. After focusing on how and why Coleridge’s model of scriptural reading works I then consider what this model can illuminate about religion and literature more generally. A key consideration will be on how the dynamics of Coleridge’s model relates to a broader trajectory of participatory ritual, scripture, and rhetoric that can traced back to debates concerning theurgy in Neoplatonism and forward to the possibilities that have emerged within various strands of contemporary Ecopoetics and Ecotheology.