Rewriting the Word "God"

In the Arc of Converging Lines between Innovative Theory, Theology, and Poetry

By Romana Huk

SERIES: Modern and Contemporary Poetics

University of Alabama Press

Innovative poetry, philosophy, theology and new sciences converge in the project of rewriting the word “God”

In Rewriting the Word “God,” Romana Huk examines the substantive connections between innovative poetry of the last century and contemporary theology and philosophy. Along the way, we encounter ten poets who have, without abandoning their inherited or chosen faith traditions, radically rethought conceptualizations of divinity, human ontology, and the real.

From the startlingly proto-phenomenological encounters with nature by Gerard Manley Hopkins to the post-deconstructive pursuit of “oracular” speech in Fanny Howe, these poets have found inspiration in a wide range of sources, from ancient religious texts to modern philosophical movements. But what unites them is their willingness to continually change, experiment and challenge the status quo, both in their religious beliefs and their poetic practice.

Huk shows how these poets have used their work to explore ultimate questions of life and death, meaning and purpose, and the relationship between humans and materiality, humans and other humans, which for these poets sheds light on humanity’s relationship with the divine. She also highlights the ways in which they have engaged with social and political issues in their poetry to speak out against injustice and oppression.

Rewriting the Word “God” is a thought-provoking and inspiring work that will challenge current perceptions of both religion and poetry from new positions at the intersection of faith, art, philosophy, science, literary theory, and culture.

Reviews

The capacious range of thinkers—from philosophy, theology, poetry—brought into the study manifests an amazingly comprehensive intellectual context that the author has analyzed, synthesized, and laid before us in strikingly original and foundational ways for reading this poetry and its religious leanings.' —Linda Kinnahan author of Feminist Modernism, Poetics, and the New Economy: Mina Loy, Lola Ridge, and Marianne Moore

This is a book bursting with critical intelligence and exhilarating ambition. Romana Huk explores several difficult frontiers at once—between Christian and Jewish imagination, between reflection on our wordless absorption in what cannot be contained and the necessity for close reading of texts and narratives, and between transcendence and secularity—and the result is an intellectual and spiritual feast of insight.’
—Rowan Williams, author of The Edge of Words: God and the Habits of Language‘

A fascinating, original, and compelling guide to the tangled life of poetics and metaphysics in modern and contemporary verse. Every page of this long book bears the mark of deep learning acquired and refined over decades. It is Huk’s formidable achievement to show how avant-garde poets think theologically.’
—Michael D. Hurley, author of Faith in Poetry: Verse Style as a Mode of Religious Belief

‘This epic, ranging, and inclusive study of modernist and innovative poetry in relation to evolving traditions of Judeo-Christian belief rewires and reanimates our understanding of American and British poets and advances models of theopoetics well judged to help other scholars respond to the twenty-first century ‘return of religion.’’
—John Kerrigan, author of Archipelagic English: Literature, History, and Politics 1603–1707

Author

Romana Huk is associate professor of English at the University of Notre Dame. She is author of Stevie Smith: Between the Lines, coeditor of Contemporary British Poetry: Essays in Theory and Criticism, and editor of Assembling Alternatives: Reading Postmodern Poetries Transnationally. She is also editor of the journal Religion & Literature.

Preface (or Argument)

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Contexts, In the Arc

PART I

1. How Myth Became the Real World

2. Demythologizing Demythologization

PART II

3. On the Evolving “Subject” of Postwar Judeo-Christianity, or: The Return of the Wandering Jew

4. Diasporic Devekuth and Deconstruction’s “New Spirit”

5. “A Single Liturgy,” or: Liberation Poetry

Epilogue (or Prologue)

Notes