The Excessive Event: Four British Church Dramas (1934-1951) and the Phenomenology of the Communion of the Saints
This article applies four phenomenological categories from the work of Jean-Luc Marion (the event, the idol, the flesh, and the icon) to four churchrelated dramas by T. S. Eliot, Charles Williams, Dorothy Sayers, and Christopher Fry - The Rock (1934), Judgment at Chelmsford (1939), The Just Vengeanc...
Main Author: | |
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Format: | Electronic Article |
Language: | English |
Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
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Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
Published: |
University of Notre Dame
2020
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In: |
Religion & literature
Year: 2019, Volume: 51/52, Issue: 3/1, Pages: 145-168 |
RelBib Classification: | CD Christianity and Culture KAJ Church history 1914-; recent history KBF British Isles KDD Protestant Church |
Further subjects: | B
Eliot, T. S. (Thomas Stearns), 1888-1965
B Consciousness B Communion of saints B Phenomenology & religion B Religious Aspects B Just Vengeance, The (Theatrical production) B Marion, Jean-Luc, 1946- |
Online Access: |
Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
Summary: | This article applies four phenomenological categories from the work of Jean-Luc Marion (the event, the idol, the flesh, and the icon) to four churchrelated dramas by T. S. Eliot, Charles Williams, Dorothy Sayers, and Christopher Fry - The Rock (1934), Judgment at Chelmsford (1939), The Just Vengeance (1946), and A Sleep of Prisoners (1951). The article examines in accumulating fashion how each play manifests one or more of Marion’s categories and, in particular, how the communio sanctorum and a revelation of love may be experienced corporately by their ecclesial audiences. Eliot’s The Rock, as a phenomenally excessive event, is experienced as shared multi-media saturation, while Williams’s Judgment at Clemsford, as a more tightly controlled spectacle, employs dance and poetry as a phenomenal idol. Sayers’s The Just Vengeance in its event-status and dramatic use of desire, also provides an aural and theological theodicy of the flesh, while Fry’s A Sleep of Prisoners employs multiple-role characterization and a radically scaled down setting to destabilize event, idol, and flesh, and thus, tenders a heightened encounter with the other. Each play explores how such audiences could together phenomenologically receive and resist the Church as both judge and defendant. |
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Item Description: | Die Hefte mit der Zählung 51.2020,3 und 52.2021,1 sind als Doppelheft erschienen |
ISSN: | 2328-6911 |
Contains: | Enthalten in: Religion & literature
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Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1353/rel.2019.0058 |