The Sleep of Christ: Incarnation and the Queerness of Heresy in W. H. Auden’s “For the Time Being”
This article explores the circuitry between queerness, heresy, and materialist theology in a major literary work by W. H. Auden from the 1940s. Rather than banking on flights of erotic or ecstatic transcendence, Auden’s “For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio” (1944) intimates queer sexuality as a...
| Published in: | Religion and the arts |
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| Main Author: | |
| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
Brill
2014
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| In: |
Religion and the arts
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| Further subjects: | B
Heresy
theology
queerness
materialism
secularity
existentialism
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| Online Access: |
Volltext (Verlag) |
| Summary: | This article explores the circuitry between queerness, heresy, and materialist theology in a major literary work by W. H. Auden from the 1940s. Rather than banking on flights of erotic or ecstatic transcendence, Auden’s “For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio” (1944) intimates queer sexuality as a heretical form of immanence bound to theologies of the creaturely body. For Auden in the early 1940s, queerness is corporeal enough to organize a theological materialism—or, more spiritedly, a theo-corporeal-ism—whose roots lie in his considerable exposure to Søren Kierkegaard’s religious existentialism. This article reads Auden’s persistent elisions of Christ’s body in “For the Time Being” vis-à-vis the oratorio’s implicit investment in queer sexuality as theologically corporeal (i.e. theo-corporeal). Notwithstanding the paradox this implicitness poses for Auden’s queer exegetes, the article maintains that “For the Time Being” is hermeneutically compatible with Marcella Althaus-Reid’s key work on queer theology. |
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| ISSN: | 1568-5292 |
| Contains: | In: Religion and the arts
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1163/15685292-01804004 |