Böhm-Schnitker N (2025)
Publication Language: English
Publication Type: Book chapter / Article in edited volumes
Publication year: 2025
Publisher: Routledge
Edited Volumes: Literary Materialisations and Interferential Reading. Making Matter Matter on Page, Stage and Screen
Series: Routledge Studies in Contemporary Literature
City/Town: New York, NY / Oxon
Book Volume: 75
Pages Range: 123-135
ISBN: 9781032294605
In John Donne’s “Of the Progress of the Soul: the Second Anniversary,” the speaker, quite in line with current new materialist approaches, forecloses a strict duality of body and mind by arguing that “one might almost say, her body thought” (l. 246). His poetry and prose prove a treasure trove for processes of embodied cognition and poetically perform what Karen Barad calls “the entanglement of matter and meaning,” quite in contrast to Cartesian ways of envisioning a duality of body and mind that now comes under critique from new materialisms. New materialisms offer an apt tool to approach Donne’s secular and religious writing as they share central concerns: the emphasis on the radical enmeshment of nature and culture and on fundamental questions about “the place of embodied humans in the material world.” In selected examples of Donne’s poetry and sermons, I will focus on chiastic structures in particular, as they highlight the ways in which Donne’s texts perform such entanglements between matter and meaning, zooming in on the enmeshments of bodies, signs minds. The aesthetics of John Donne’s poetry and prose reveal meaning to be embodied and make matter matter.
APA:
Böhm-Schnitker, N. (2025). Making Embodiment Matter in John Donne’s “The Cross” and Death’s Duel. In Ingrid Hotz-Davies, Martin Middeke, Christoph Reinfandt (Eds.), Literary Materialisations and Interferential Reading. Making Matter Matter on Page, Stage and Screen. (pp. 123-135). New York, NY / Oxon: Routledge.
MLA:
Böhm-Schnitker, Nadine. "Making Embodiment Matter in John Donne’s “The Cross” and Death’s Duel." Literary Materialisations and Interferential Reading. Making Matter Matter on Page, Stage and Screen. Ed. Ingrid Hotz-Davies, Martin Middeke, Christoph Reinfandt, New York, NY / Oxon: Routledge, 2025. 123-135.
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