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265Varieties and valences of unsayabilityPhilosophy and Literature 29 (2): 489-497. 2005.Examples of unsayability of the most disparate sorts are cited from literature (Shakespeare, Melville, James, Aeschylus, and others) in order to suggest the uncircumscribable diversity of motives for unsayability. The question is whether they all have anything in common. When something cannot be said because of politeness or obscenity or deceit or strategy, does this have anything to do with the metaphysical motives for unsayability? These things are not per se unsayable but only conditionall…Read more
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131Dante's inferno as poetic revelation of prophetic truthPhilosophy and Literature 33 (2). 2009.In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Dante's Inferno as Poetic Revelation of Prophetic TruthWilliam FrankeIDante's Inferno demands to be understood as the culmination of a series of visits to the underworld in ancient epic tradition. Dante's most direct precedent is Aeneas's journey to meet his father in Hades, as told by Virgil in Book VI of the Aeneid. Aeneas's voyage is modeled in turn on Odysseus's encounter with shades of Hades in Book XI of the Odyssey. The epic q…Read more
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On What Cannot Be Said: Apophatic Discourses in Philosophy, Religion, Literature, and the Arts: Volume 2: Modern and Contemporary Transformations (edited book)University of Notre Dame Press. 2007.“Any writer worth his salt knows that what cannot be spoken is ultimately the thing worth speaking about; yet most often this humbling awareness is unsaid or covered up. There are some who have made it their business, however, to court failure and acknowledge defeat, to explore the impasse of words before silence. William Franke has created an anthology of such explorations, undertaken in poetry and prose, that stretches from Plato to the present. Whether the subject of discourse is All or Nothi…Read more
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18Augustine’s Confessions and the Transcendental Ground of Consciousness, or How Literary Narrative Becomes Prophetic RevelationPhilosophy and Literature 38 (1): 204-222. 2014.The generic paradigms for Augustine’s discourse include not only autobiography but also theology, philosophy, exegesis, and “confession.” However, most importantly of all, Augustine’s discourse is cast into the form of a dialogue with God. His life story, unfolding in a succession of anecdotes, forms a horizontal axis that is traversed by and wholly subsumed under a vertical axis, along which he converses directly with God. The point of view evoked through this dialogue is not a temporally finit…Read more
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2Warren Ginsberg, Dante's Aesthetics of Being. Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 1999. Pp. xv, 175. $42.50 (review)Speculum 76 (3): 727-729. 2001.
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Hermeneutics, Historicity, and Poetry as Theological Revelation in Dante's Divine ComedyIn Jan Lloyd Jones (ed.), Art and Time, Australian Scholarly Publishing. pp. 39. 2007.The classical is defined by Gadamer, following and adapting Hegel, as “self-significant” and “self-interpretive”. By its power of interpreting itself, the classic reaches into the present and addresses it. In so doing, the classical precedes, encompasses and anticipates latter-day interpretations within its own already-in-progress self-interpretation: “the classical preserves itself precisely because it is significant in itself and interprets itself; that is, it speaks in such a way that it is n…Read more
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13Poetry and Apocalypse: Theological Disclosures of Poetic LanguageStanford University Press. 2008.In _Poetry and Apocalypse_, Franke seeks to find the premises for dialogue between cultures, especially religious fundamentalisms—including Islamic fundamentalism—and modern Western secularism. He argues that in order to be genuinely open, dialogue needs to accept possibilities such as religious apocalypse in ways that can be best understood through the experience of poetry. Franke reads Christian epic and prophetic tradition as a secularization of religious revelation that preserves an understa…Read more
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31All or nothing? Nature in chinese thought and the apophatic occidentComparative Philosophy 5 (2). 2014.This paper develops an interpretation of nature in classical Chinese culture through dialogue with the work of François Jullien. I understand nature negatively as precisely what never appears as such nor ever can be exactly apprehended and defined. For perception and expression entail inevitably human mediation and cultural transmission by semiotic and hermeneutic means that distort and occult the natural in the full depth of its alterity. My claim is that the largely negative approach to nature…Read more
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Vanderbilt UniversityProfessor
Nashville, Tennessee, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Metaphysics and Epistemology |
Philosophical Traditions |