The Literary Imagination York University

[Jenifer Griffard]

Wolffread his brilliant story in a packed chapel at a literary conference. The gathering, held Feb. 19 to 21 at the University of Southern California, was called The Future of the Catholic Literary Imagination." It was organized by the Institute for Advanced Catholic Studies. Essayists, novelists, poets, editors and scholars discussed, among other things, the following questions:

The skateboarders also nearly ran us down every other moment as we crossed campus going from one talk to the next on the marginalization of Catholics in the current culture. You wondered if these boys were trying to marginalize you and your Catholicism out of existence.

But against all these odds, this gathering was altogether a nice thing. It was, if nothing else, a chance to be with people who took both their writing (editing, publishing, etc) and their faith seriously. The event, despite its irrefutable ontology as a university conference and my referencing of high-toned authors, was actually quite lovely.

Before heading off to Florence in the fall, Saiber met with Selby Frame, Associate Director of Academic Communications, to discuss the byways of her life as a scholar and teacher ... and how research into the geometry of language is leading her into surprising new explorations of neuroscience.

AS: I get all kinds of reactions from people when they find out what I do for a living. When I was in grad school, people would say, "What are you going to do with a Ph.D. in Italian? I'd say: "I'm going to open a pizzeria, what else?!" [laughter] Too much to explain ... Italian language and culture are at the foundations of our western civilization. There is so much to study, to say, and to work with as a teacher and a scholar.

SF: Your wide-ranging intellectual palate is very much reflected in the courses you teach, which tend to celebrate Italian culture in highly original ways. You taught a course titled "Mona Lisa and the Mafia." This past year you covered everything from Renaissance love, cooking, etiquette, and guidelines for dying, in a course called "How To Do It," which studied "how-to" manuals of the Renaissance." Where do your teaching ideas come from?

AS: The Middle Ages and Renaissance in Italy lend themselves to really neat stuff. I've always been interested in "pop culture," as well as the fringe and avant garde of every period. I also find there is much that is stimulating, provocative and at times playful in the canonical literature. So my courses treat the canon, the "pop," and the "fringe" because I want students to see the material from all angles and hope that each student will connect with something and run with it.

SF: That critical fascination for language has brought you to some very interesting places in your own scholarship, notably, your research on the intersection between geometry and literature. Not a trajectory you would imagine for an Italian Renaissance scholar. How did that all come about?

From a scholarly point of view, it's a pretty natural leap from mathematics to Renaissance literature. With the fall of Constantinople in 1453, an immense amount of Classical texts, including mathematical treatises, were brought to Italy by Humanist scholars eager to revive the philosophies and knowledge of Antiquity.

The relationships between Renaissance mathematics and art, music, and architecture are subjects that have been looked at in great depth and with good reason. But little has been done in terms of looking at Renaissance mathematics and literature. It is, in fact, harder to see the commerce between these two arts. How do you look at a page of text, with words lined up horizontally from left to right, organized into paragraphs and chapters, and see mathematical influences? Obviously, mathematics' presence can be discussed conceptually with regard to content, but can it manifest in other ways?

SF: Do you mean that a mathematical pattern might exist within textual works that we're not aware of? Some syntactical construction the author developed to reflect some pattern of divine order, for example?

The Church was fascinated by trinities, by particular triangular shapes and proportions that supported readings of the bible. Tartaglia's use of threes for his poem is a fusion of aesthetic principles, mnemonic strategies, and mathematics, as well as an echo of Christian doctrine and symbolism.

I am interested in how Renaissance thinkers structured their literary works to conform to aesthetic, theological, and mathematical ideals. In this period, language, geometric form, and number fused at a deep conceptual level. I don't believe that this is the only period in Western history in which this happened, but rather that the Renaissance was particularly conscious and intentional about this dialogue.

Ultimately, I want to understand how the mathematical imagination works and how the literary imagination works. While we do not know exactly where and how each takes place in the brain, they likely share some neural pathways. They seem to do similar things. For example, when a mathematical equation is solved, or a theory proved, they look like stories that unfold step-by-step. We all understand narrative flow in stories. Why, then, would most people consider math "harder" than reading or writing a short story?

AS: It is what most scholars at a liberal-arts college like Bowdoin contend with. Basically, you just do it. You finish one book, then immediately start research on another book. You also keep working on articles, conference papers, book reviews, etc. And you keep funneling what you are doing in your research into your teaching. To continue the momentum of research and have your publications be timely, waiting years for your next sabbatical isn't easy!

Below is an excerpt from an edited transcript from the public discussion Salman Rushdie had with Gauri Viswanathan. The full transcript was recently published in the new book Boundaries of Toleration, edited by Alfred Stepan and Charles Taylor as part of our series, Religion, Culture, and Public Life. You can read more of the conversation here.

Gauri Viswanthan: Let me begin by asking a simple question, not about religion and the imagination, the title of this session, but about religion as imagination. If, as could be argued, conceptualizing an unseen power inherently involves human imaginings of the divine, what does the literary imagination add? Or what work does it do that is different from the religious imagination? Do you see yourself trying to recover, through literature, the impulses of a religious imagination before it freezes into theology, before experience turns into a theological, ethical construct?

Viswanathan: In fact, The Ground Beneath Her Feet is the novel I wanted to talk about a little bit. You have pairs of contrasting characters in this novel such as the ultrarationalist Sir Darius and the miracle-chasing wife, Lady Spenta. For Sir Darius, every intellectual effort begins with the death of the gods, and he seeks out a secular origin prior to all religion, whereas his wife searches for enchantment. And in The Enchantress of Florence, your most recent novel, you have Akbar as a modern man who questions the existence of God and presides over spirited debates in the tent of the new worship between competing philosophical schools. Yet the same rationalist skeptic has created his imaginary Queen Jodha, and he lives in a world steeped in magic and miracles. So I wanted to ask you how you reconcile these two images cohabiting the same world, these super-rationalist figures who are highly skeptical and who privilege human effort over religion and yet, at the same time, are encompassed by this world of miracles and magic.

Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination is a 1992 work of literary criticism by Toni Morrison. In it she develops a reading of major white American authors and traces the way their perceptions of blackness gave defining shape to their works, and thus to the American literary canon.

In 1990, Morrison delivered a series of three lectures at the William E. Massey Sr. Lectures in American Studies at Harvard University; she then adapted the texts to a 91-page book, Playing in the Dark, published in 1992 by Harvard University Press.[1] The book's three chapters are "Black Matters",[2] "Romancing the Shadow", and "Disturbing Nurses and the Kindness of Sharks".

In Playing in the Dark, Morrison develops literary criticism of major white authors like Willa Cather, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Ernest Hemingway, tracing the way their work dealt with and was shaped by their handling of the subject of blackness. She finds blackness playing a significant role in structuring these authors' works, and thus the American canon. Writing in the journal Signs, Linda Krumholz described Morrison's project as "reread[ing] the American literary canon through an analysis of whiteness to propose the ways that black people were used to establish American identity."[4]

Michael Eric Dyson observes that in addition to this exploration of the "white literary imagination...Playing in the Dark is also about a black intellectual seizing the interpretive space within a racially ordered hierarchy of cultural criticism. Blacks are usually represented through the lens of white perception rather than the other way around...With [Playing in the Dark], a substantial change is portended."[6]

In 2016, Time magazine noted that Playing in the Dark was among Morrison's most-assigned texts on U.S. college campuses, together with several of her novels and her 1993 Nobel Prize lecture, making her one of the most-assigned of all female writers.[7]

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