Literature, Poetry, and Philosophy of Religion

Drawing on a hueristic that combines Walter Benjamin's concept of history with Martin Buber's philosophy of dialogue, this paper argues that Adrienne Rich's poetry exemplifies an intentional relation to histories of oppression, and that she deserves a more prominent place in the history of queer theory. With an underlying philosophical paradigm provided by Buber and Benjamin, I interpret a selection of Rich's essays and poems, framing her poems as 'artifacts of saying You to the wreckage of history,' particularly to the history of hetero-patriarchal oppression. This framework underscores Rich's prescient, perhaps still underappreciated contribution to queer theory, provides an example of how the resources of religious thought and poetry can come together to offer fresh perspectives on philosophy, and highlights poetry's capacity for imagining and conveying new modes of being in the world, a capacity that may outstrip that of discursive philosophical prose.

This paper reads Anne Sexton’s “Sickness Unto Death” alongside that of Kierkegaard to argue that literature can serve as the metafiction of philosophy. I suggest that Sexton’s poetic engagement with Kierkegaard makes salient the precise structure of despair’s transformation from experience to expression to concept. Her writing does this by thinking about itself as a participant in the confessional process it facilitates. I argue that this confession embodies despair as a specific structure of the relationship between subject and experience, an at-once literary and existential form which consequently structures expression, communication, and address. Sexton's engagement with Kierkegaard offers us a new way of thinking about the role of literature in philosophy--an alternative what Hollywood, Hammerschlag, and Furey describe as the empty use of "literary texts as exempla for already articulated philosophical views." Instead, her poetry moves us beyond ornamentation and embodiment—and towards the constructive possibilities of metafiction.

Philosophy of religion names a method: a way of asking questions about what we call religion. Literature can do that, too, in ways that can methodologically expand ways of doing philosophy of religion. This paper explores these paths of possibility by turning to Clarice Lispector, whose texts do philosophy by being literature: by doing what literature can do. This paper unpacks this suggestion by turning to _A Breath of Life: Pulsations_. It’s a complicating text, because it’s a transgenred text: a novel that’s a play that’s a kind of autobiography and, maybe, an auto-elegy. By reading _A Breath of Life_ as literature, and  attending to the (philosophically speaking) expected and unexpected questions that _A Breath of Life_ poses through its ways of writing, this paper suggests that _A Breath of Life_ can teach philosophy of religion new methodological lessons and offer new possibilities of questioning through literature.

After broadly addressing the question of this session, How literature and poetry contribute to philosophy of religion, I turn to Du Bois. His philosophical reflections and arguments are lyrical and affective; his poetic and literary works are conceptual and argumentative. An intimate dance between the cognitive, lyrical, and affective permeates Du Bois’s works, and they thereby become one answer to the session’s question: literature and poetry contribute to philosophy of religion when they mutually inform each other. In the Souls of Black Folks, Du Bois’s philosophy is written in a lyrical (a literary and poetic) mode; in Darkwater, Du Bois’s poetry and fiction is written in a philosophical mode. And in both books, Du Bois is the master storyteller. Richard Rorty claimed that we need “a turn against theory and toward narrative.” Contrary to Rorty, I recommend a turn to a poetic narrativist philosophy as exemplified by Du Bois.