Abstract
This essay aims to analyze two hermeneutic strategies of the cultural absorption and transformation of traumatic experience, which seem to be pivotal for the European and American literatures of the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. This is the search for an ultimate ontological ground for the transcendence of the traumatic, on the one hand, and the acknowledgement of the insuperable semantic indeterminacy of human existence, on the other. These strategies are analyzed with reference to the explicitly posttraumatic literature of European Modernism and the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, in particular. With an eye on this general goal, the first section of this essay addresses a number of theoretical problems that are related to the study of the hermeneutics of trauma in literature. It suggests that this hermeneutics can be more accurately understood in terms of historically variable “cultural dominants” and their combination in the hermeneutics used by specific texts or individual writers. The second section of the essay turns to the problems of the study of Modernism in relation to the problem of trauma and suggests that the epistemological framework of the “rapture in the episteme” can be usefully employed for the conceptualization of traumatic experiences that underlie the advent of literary Modernism. The third section focuses on the biography and poetics of the first European Modernist, Gerard Manley Hopkins, while underscoring their traumatic components. The forth section analyzes the main hermeneutic strategies used by Hopkins for the purposes of the representation and conceptualization of existential experiences. Drawing upon this analysis, the next and the longest section of this paper examines Hopkins’s “dark sonnets,” which articulate suffering and pain, question their meaning and meaninglessness. It is through this analysis of Hopkins’s late poetry that the two opposed hermeneutic strategies, which this essay aims to foreground and understand, as well as a unique relation between them in Hopkins’s works, become especially palpable. The concluding section returns to a more general discussion of Modernism in literature; it stresses the uniqueness of the hermeneutics of trauma in Hopkins, on the one hand, and the existence of a shared hermeneutic repertoire for dealing with the traumatic, on the other.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Norman White writes: “Confronted with endless piles of examination scripts, he was shock ed by the poor standard of answers, and by their grammar, expression, and spelling… Hopkins’s bewildered and hopeless remarks reveal the fastidious distance between his standards and those of the students…” (White, 1992, pp. 371–372).
- 2.
References
Adorno, T. W. (1973). Negative dialectics. New York: Seabury Press.
Althusser, L. (1971). Lenin and philosophy and other essays. London: New Left Books.
Armstrong, T. (2005). Modernism: A cultural history. Cambridge: Polity.
Badiou, A. (2001). Ethics: An essay on the understanding of evil. London, New York: Verso.
Benjamin, W. (1977). The origin of German tragic drama. London: NLB.
Bradshaw, D., & Dettmar, K. J. H. (Eds.). (2005). A companion to modernist literature and culture. Oxford: Blackwell.
Brodskii, I. A. (2014). Maloye sobranie sochinenii. St. Petersburg: Azbuka.
De Man, P. (1983). The Rhetoric of Temporality. In P. de Man (Ed.), Blindness and insignt: Essays in the rhetoric of contemporary criticism (2nd ed., pp. 187–228). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Faulkner, P. (1977). Modernism. London: Methuen.
Foucault, M. (1970). The order of things: An archaeology of the human sciences. London: Tavistock Publications.
Foucault, M. (1972). The archaeology of knowledge. London: Tavistock Publications.
Gardner, W. H. (1948). Gerard Manley Hopkins: A study of poetic idiosyncrasy in relation to poetic tradition. London: Martin Secker & Warburg.
Hartman, G. (1966). Introduction: Poetry and justification. In G. Hartman (Ed.), Hopkins: A collection of critical essays (pp. 1–15). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Hopkins, G. M. (1930). In R. Bridges & C. Williams (Eds.), Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins (2nd ed.). London: Oxford University Press.
Hopkins, G. M. (1955a). In C. C. Abbott (Ed.), The correspondence of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Richard Watson Dixon. London: Oxford University Press, Geoffrey Cumberlenge.
Hopkins, G. M. (1955b). In C. C. Abbott (Ed.), The letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins to Robert Bridges. London: Oxford University Press, Geoffrey Cumberlege.
Hopkins, G. M. (1956). In C. C. Abbott (Ed.), Further letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins, including his correspondence with Coventry Patmore. London: Oxford University Press.
Hopkins, G. M. (1959a). In H. House & G. Storey (Eds.), The journals and papers of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hopkins, G. M. (1959b). In C. Devlin (Ed.), The sermons and devotional writings of Gerard Manley Hopkins. London: Oxford University Press.
Krutch, J. W. (1931). The modern temper: A study and confession. New York: Harcourt, Brace.
Lewis, P. (2007). The Cambridge introduction to modernism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
MacKenzie, N. H. (1981). A reader’s guide to Gerard Manley Hopkins. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
MacKenzie, N. H. (1990). Commentary. In G. M. Hopkins (Ed.), The poetical works of Gerard Manley Hopkins (pp. 213–513). Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Mariani, P. (1970). A commentary on the complete poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.
Mariani, P. (2008). Gerard Manley Hopkins: A life. New York: Viking.
Martin, R. B. (1991). Gerard Manley Hopkins: A very private life. London: Harper Collins: Flamingo.
O’Flynn, G. (1987–1988). Hopkins’s teaching. The Hopkins Quarterly, 14.1–4:163–178.
Olney, J. (1993). The language(s) of poetry: Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Gerard Manley Hopkins. Athens: University of Georgia Press.
Peirce, C. S. (1932). Collected papers of Charles Sanders Peirce (Vol. 2). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press and the Belknap Press.
Rose, A. M. (1977). Hopkins “Carrion Comfort”: The artful disorder of prayer. Victorian Poetry, 15, 207–217.
Sobolev, D. (2011). The split world of Gerard Manley Hopkins: An essay in semiotic phenomenology. Washington, DC, Baltimore: The Catholic University of America Press.
Sobolev, D. (2013). Allegoria uMashmaut beYetsirat Kafka. In Z. Shamir, Y. Ataria, & H. Nagid (Eds.), Kafka: Perspektivot hadashot (pp. 24–67). Tel-Aviv: Safra (in Hebrew).
White, N. (1986). Hopkins’ Sonnet “No worst, there is none” and the storm scenes in King Lear. Victorian Poetry, 24(1), 83–87.
White, N. (1992). Hopkins: A literary biography. Oxford: Clarendon.
White, N. (2002). Hopkins in Ireland. Dublin: University College Dublin Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2016 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Sobolev, D. (2016). The Trauma of Modernism: Between Existential Indeterminacy and Allegoresis . In: Ataria, Y., Gurevitz, D., Pedaya, H., Neria, Y. (eds) Interdisciplinary Handbook of Trauma and Culture. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-29404-9_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-29404-9_5
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-29402-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-29404-9
eBook Packages: Behavioral Science and PsychologyBehavioral Science and Psychology (R0)