«Ya, ya se abren las flores»: la lírica de Santa Teresa en la historia literaria de la mística cristiana

Son muy pocos los místicos cristianos en la Edad Media occidental que han recurrido al verso como vehículo expresivo: una anomalía histórica si se compara, por ejemplo, con la centralidad de la poesía strictu senso en la historia literaria del sufismo árabe y persa. La primera mitad de la charla ofrece una valoración de conjunto sobre la lírica de Santa Teresa en la historia literaria de la mística cristiana, enmarcada por referencias selectivas a sus exiguos precursores en el siglo XIII (Mechtild de Magdeburg, Hadewijch de Brabante, Jacopone da Todi y Richard Rolle) y con la literatura amatoria hispánica como telón de fondo. La segunda mitad de la presentación ilustra la estética de la Santa con una lectura de su glosa lírica al Cantar de los Cantares 2,16: «Dilectus meus mihi et ego illi».

Medieval Pärt

Supported by modernity’s desires, fantasies, and aversions toward the premodern past and a cultivated branding strategy, popular reception of Arvo Pärt commonly figures both man and music as embodiments of a kind of medieval mysticism. Taking this image as a cue for analysis, this chapter considers how the medieval, taken as a historical force that traverses chronological temporality, stands to expand our understanding of contemporary experiential encounters with Pärt’s music. The grounds of this analysis lie in the textuality and manuscript contexts of the writings of Richard Rolle of Hampole, Pärt’s musical and mystical counterpart of the English Middle Ages. Rolle’s mysticism encourages certain spiritualized styles of hearing sound and silence that, when applied to Pärt’s music in manuscript, edition, and performance, allow us recognize important qualities—medieval qualities—that otherwise go unnoticed in his music. Drawing on sound studies methodologies, the chapter thus asks not how Pärt is medieval, but what the medieval helps us hear in Pärt.

Book III

This chapter envisions the Wake as part of the tradition of dream vision literature. Beginning with the first critical writing on the Wake that sought to contextualize the book as such, and reassessing more contemporary views that the Wake is not part of the genre, the chapter lays out the tradition from the origins of English poetry and demonstrates Joyce’s adaptation and conformity with it. Part of the chapter engages Giordano Bruno’s extensive writings on dreaming and sight. The chapter takes into consideration the end result of dreaming—awakening—and situates the Wake as an aubade as well as an example of dream vision. In so doing it connects Joyce’s work to possible sources of inspiration, such as Gerard Manley Hopkins, John Bishop, Geoffrey Chaucer, The Dream of the Rood, and Richard Rolle, and looks into the criticism of Derek Attridge, Edmund Wilson, and John Bishop.