The fourth chapter deals with two post-apartheid texts by South African writers: Justin Cartwright’s In Every Face I Meet (1995) and J. M. Coetzee’s Youth (2002). In his London-based ‘autrebiography’, Coetzee considers the complex relationship between the ‘white writer’ and South Africa. In Every Face I Meet draws intertextually on William Blake’s poem ‘London’ to explore issues of racism, social inequality and colonial legacies in 1980s and early 1990s London. The chapter explores how these texts present the imbrication of race discourses and racisms from London, South Africa and other spaces in both the 1960s when immigration from former British colonies increased (Coetzee) and during the state-sanctioned racism of Margaret Thatcher’s tenure (Cartwright). Furthermore, in Coetzee’s novel in particular, the postmodern form inscribes the unwriteable and unreadable nature not only of London, but also of South Africa.

This chapter expounds and lingers with the poetics of monasticism, specifically the poetics of monastic discretion or discernment, especially as it appears in the Conferences of John Cassian. In dialogue with Michel Foucault and Thomas Merton, as well as modern poets Marilyn Hacker, Jane Hirshfield and Melissa Range, this chapter suggests that monastic speech and monastic bodies take materiality seriously, as something seriously mysterious and seriously inchoate, even and especially when that materiality proves to be a limitation. To be monastic, in life and in language, is to be always beginning.

This essay reveals how Thomas Middleton’s city comedy The Puritan Widow (1607) attempted to reconcile the conflicting religious roles of the play’s protagonist – Lady Plus – as chaste widow to her sexualised potential as a remarried wife. The play wryly subsumes what is here termed ‘devotion to mirth’ with devotion to God, whereby the dramatisation of communal feasting, festive combat and the wearing of livery all lead to the marriage altar, the re-establishment of Protestant religious values and the play’s denouement. In this way, audiences could be taught to adopt religious conformity through dramatic and festive re-enactment – satire could (and often did) point to the sacred. In this way, English playwrights could mock devotions and model them too.

Where Edward traveled frequently to the Continent, particularly France, and became a part of the European intellectual community, his younger brother George never left England. Written by a sixty-year-old disgruntled courtier under the pressures of a civil war in which the neutrality to which he aspired became impossible to sustain, Edward Herbert’s autobiography is a valuable record of the frivolous, violent, vain, yet strangely familiar world of early modern England. If The Temple is George Herbert’s lyric evidence of his struggles for spiritual submission, the Autobiography is Edward Herbert’s prose narrative of his battles to achieve social mastery. In it, Edward reveals himself to be as attentive to the nuances of social ceremony as George was to the rhythms of devotional liturgy. Both show a fine-tuned sensitivity to the nuances of behavior, appearance, and status. Together, they tell us something valuable about the hazards and prospects of selfhood in early modern Europe and how working for universal peace implied forms of war with oneself and, sometimes, with local social communities.

This chapter argues for and attempts to embody a critical poetics of waiting—not just for the Middle Ages but with them. Through medieval sources (Béroul, Dante) as well as modern ones (Jean-Louis Chrétien, Martin Seel, Simone Weil), it becomes apparent that to experience the world most fully might be also to wait for it. Practicing a kind of critical and existential attentiveness, we are able to be taken by surprise precisely where we thought surprise was no longer possible, as poet Marie Howe demonstrates in her lyric meditation on embodiment, death, and sandwiches.

Reading David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest in the tradition of Joyce’s Ulysses, this chapter argues that Infinite Jest reinterprets Joyce’s use of a secular trinity, a model of community through the recognition of a shared human substance, by means of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. Joyce’s trinity is thus transformed into a collaboration of author, reader, and text in the production of meaning, the novel thereby proposing a literary public language game as an alternative to solipsizing, endless deconstruction. This ghostly return of the dead author as dialogic, effaced yet present, allows for sincere communication between author and reader without recourse to a form of biographical reading reprimanded by post-structuralist philosophers. Philosophy and literature cross-fertilizing each other, Infinite Jest picks up narrative strategies of Ulysses and philosophically examines and literarily modifies them through ordinary language philosophy in order to make them applicable to the postmodern solipsism the novel perceives as its general human condition.

The early chapters of the present study consider how Nietzsche’s ideas bore on the reconceptualisation of the role of the Irish artist and the development of new forms of Irish writing during the first decade of the twentieth century. Chapter 1 examines Shaw in the guise of a self-styled ‘artist-philosopher’, who sought to provoke his London audience – so concerned with profit making, social class, and late Victorian respectability – into recognising its own short-sightedness, as he worked to remake the national conscience of both England and Ireland. In doing so, the chapter provides the first comprehensive reading of Shaw’s Man and Superman (1903) in terms of Nietzsche’s philosophy. Capitalising on the philosopher’s growing reputation, and appropriating his most infamous creation, the Übermensch, Shaw’s text develops a sprawling, contradictory, dialectical new form of drama in order to promote something that Nietzsche’s oeuvre did not offer: a coherent political philosophy. Like his German counterpart, the Irish playwright pursued a position both within and without traditional philosophical discourse and its field of cultural production, where he could enjoy both the benefits of membership and the returns on transgression. His first ‘drama of ideas’ mingled Nietzschean philosophy, Fabian socialism, and Lamarckian evolutionary theory, along with a parodic comedy of manners, a surreal tableau called ‘Don Juan in Hell’, and an appended ‘Revolutionist’s Handbook’, which collectively strain against the traditional form of the well-made play and shatter the rhetorical conventions of philosophical discourse. But this new ‘modernist’ form of drama nonetheless served to advance a Shavian vision of human enhancement and political transformation. A real revolution, whether in England or Ireland, would only be brought about by changing the ‘raw material’ of the citizenry – the physiological basis of their moral sensibility and collective conscience – in order to raise the national community to heights previously associated with the singular Übermensch. The title of Shaw’s play linked his own reputation to the reception of Nietzsche’s writing, and also allowed critics to write off his ‘drama of ideas’ as recycled German philosophy, though the play itself ultimately offered a type of political philosophy – and worrying propaganda – like nothing before seen on the page or stage in England or Ireland.

This chapter examines the place of uselessness in the history of queer representation by looking back to the moment of fin-de-siècle aestheticism. Whilst usefulness has been associated rhetorically with difference (legible most clearly in the idiomatic rendering of usefulness as 'making a difference'), this chapter explores how queers have been associated with sameness in the form of a perceived ineffectiveness that, rather than making a difference, tends to leave things the same. In particular, it addresses two aesthete protagonists from the novels of Henry James: Rowland Mallet in Roderick Hudson (1875) and Gabriel Nash in The Tragic Muse (1890). The chapter argues that the particular brand of aestheticism they embody (more attached to 'theory' than anything else) throws into relief some of the commitments of contemporary scholarship that has focused on queer failure and backwardness. Situated in a history in which queer theory itself has been subject to charges of uselessness from scholars apparently better attuned to the materialities of lived experience, Rowland and Gabriel serve to flag up a longer history of intimate connection between queers and uselessness.

This chapter questions the suggestion that has already been made of a spiritual convergence between George Herbert and St. François de Sales. The elimination of turbulence and urgency from the inner life certainly was a goal for St. François, but it was certainly not consistently or predominantly so for the George Herbert of the lyrics. But what of the “sweetness” connection? They both saw the religious life as providing pleasure, including in the Eucharist, or Holy Communion. But this does not mean that their Eucharistic theologies were identical, a consideration that must enter the comparison. There is a great deal more “affliction” in the religious life as Herbert presents it than as St. François does – which almost certainly derives from “doctrine,” from differing theological pictures of the postlapsarian human self. St. François, following the Catholic and especially Teresian mystical tradition, does not want to distinguish sharply between physical and spiritual “sweetness.” Herbert is clear on the distinction, though willing to use the analogy. Herbert’s deliberately contentious view and poetry contrasts with the staidness of much of what he reacted against in continental thinking. Close analysis of these texts indicates that, contrary to much recent criticism, doctrine matters, shaping the tenor and substance of life.

This chapter considers David Foster Wallace’s relationship to issues and images of performance by examining his frequent writing about technologically unmediated live theatre, often moments evocative of the Platonic dialogues, their theatrical elements, and the interplay of Socrates and the Sophists. On the basis of such Wallace scenes and Martin Puchner’s theories of philosophical theatre, the chapter argues that being a philosopher for Wallace is an art frequently, if not always, tied to performances of a certain exacting and humbling kind. The readings are grounded in moments from across Wallace’s oeuvre (though concentrated in Brief Interviews, with some attention paid as well to Infinite Jest and The Pale King) that occupy one or both of two major domains: first, expertly crafted scenes of dialogue that mark a twist on the Platonic dialogues and their dramatic staging of philosophical conflict, particularly when it involves the sophistry Wallace found dominating postmodernity; and second, moments that conjure not just performance but a particularly abject stage performer, showing that Wallace, while seeing no ultimate escape from the artifices of performance, would at crucial moments strategically strip performers down to a state of naked vulnerability. In crucial moments of powerful idea-making where he relies on theatrical metaphors, opposes live stage performance to the kind that TV and film offer, and plays with definitions of the performer to unseat an ensconced idea, Wallace is, this chapter argues, a philosopher-dramatist.

This chapter examines unexplored parallels between three French Protestant poets and George Herbert, noting signs of shared rhetorical and spiritual strategies of internal struggle. John Donne’s Sonnet XIV, “Batter my heart, three person’d God,” bears clear resemblances to Grévin’s third sonnet in the second part of the Gélodacrye. George Herbert, too, may have been influenced by some of Grévin’s sonnets, particularly when one considers the common coteries within which the Herberts and Donne moved. Close parallels in language and syntax between Herbert’s poems and poems by popular French Protestant poets of the time strongly imply influence. In all four poets, lively and contentious forms of communion are predicated on the radical inequality between the poet and God, answered by an adoptive call and look designed to transform and transport the poet and reader. Close parallels of insistent repetition, vehementia, and ternary correspondence are among the rhetorical similarities explored in detail.