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Intellectual History Commons

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Full-Text Articles in Intellectual History

Literary Theories Of Circumcision, A. W. Strouse Jun 2017

Literary Theories Of Circumcision, A. W. Strouse

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“Literary Theories of Circumcision” investigates a school of thought in which the prepuce, as a conceptual metaphor, organizes literary experience. In every period of English literature, major authors have employed the penis’s hood as a figure for thinking about reading and writing. These authors belong to a tradition that defines textuality as a foreskin and interpretation as circumcision. In “Literary Theories of Circumcision,” I investigate the origins of this literary-theoretical formulation in the writings of Saint Paul, and then I trace this formulation’s formal applications among medieval, early modern, and modernist writers. My study lays the groundwork for an ambitious …


Historiography As Devotion, Suzanne Abrams Rebillard Jan 2012

Historiography As Devotion, Suzanne Abrams Rebillard

School of Information Studies - Post-doc and Student Scholarship

This article locates Gregory of Nazianzus's Poemata de seipso in the Classical historiographical tradition by comparing their historical meta-narrative to Herodotus' and Thucydides'. It then embarks on a case study of Poem 34, On Silence During Lent, closely analyzing the poem in light of recent narratological work on Herodotus' project. Like the Herodotean text, Gregory's piece reveals a variety of hermeneutical possibilities while simultaneously making the audience aware of the histor's compositional processes. The histor who emerges is a salvific and cosmological presence that focalizes the divine, thereby serving as an example of proper human/ divine relations. The poem would …