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KEYNOTE SPEECH for “Tell it Slant: A Symposium on Theology and the Arts,” St. Translation into Chinese) at International Symposium on “The Orient vs. 3, issue 2, March/April (2016) “William Franke, A Philosophy of the Unsayable,”. ACADEMIC LECTURES: Anniversary Lectures, Series Lectures, Named Lectures.
Porphyry’s in the Cave of the Nymphs inaugurates a style of philosophico-allegorical interpretation of literary texts that flourished in antiquity and that finds analogues in criticism down to the present. It is distinguished by its use of literary interpretation to think through speculative problems of philosophy and theology. Although it became suspect in terms of Enlightenment philological principles prescribing interpretation of the text. In its own terms, this kind of criticism reveals the originally philosophical motives and purpose of literary criticism and restores to literature the vocation of disclosing a properly poetic truth higher than that of fact or history. The history of this type of speculative criticism stemming from Porphyry reading of Homer is then traced forward through Latin allegorical readings of epic revolving around Virgil.
This itinerary highlights the perennial and inevitable tensions between philological and philosophical approaches to interpreting literature as a revelation of truth, even of theological truth. International Conference on The Force of Imagination, University of Macao.