Theopoetics: Si(g)ns of Copulation Crystal Downing What theology needs is more copulation. And postmodern theopoetics may well provide it. The word copulation, of course, denotes coupling: the bringing together and/or union of two things. The related words “copula” and “copulative” are grammatical terms, used to describe the linking of elements in a sentence. How unfortunate, then, that the fertile term copulation has been reduced in meaning, often with the limited connotation of animal(istic) sex. In the sixteenth century, however, copulation was still robust, the word used not only for sex and grammar, but also for theology. The OED exemplifies the word’s breadth with an illustration from 1548: “The wonderful copulation of the sayed nature vnto ours by his incarnation.” The dictionary’s example from 1623 implies that the copulation of divine and human in the Christ‐event elicits copulation on the part of Christ’s followers: “The copulation of a living faith and obedience together.” In this essay, I will argue that theopoetics, if truly postmodern, returns us to the copulation of living faith and obedience—if even in different terms than dreamt of in the philosophy of 1623, a year tremendously significant to any authentic lover of poetics. For 1623 is the publication date of the First Folio of Shakespeare’s works. My allusion to this definitive text of Western poetics, wherein appears “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,/Than are dreamt of in your philosophy,” has a purpose. There is, as it were, method to my madness. For by aligning the “authentic” with the First Folio, I intentionally signal a failure of copulation. I have overpowered theology with a narrow definition of poetics, assuming that knowledge of practitioners in my discipline, literary studies, instantiates authenticity. Something similar tempts theologians drawn to theopoetics: by ignoring the copulation signaled by the term theopoetics—the coupling of Greek roots for god and to make—some reduce theology to poetical practices. In contrast, I will encourage the copulation inherent to postmodern theopoetics, distinguishing it from the onanism of theopoetics in a modernist style. I will then illustrate postmodern theopoetics with the creativity of Dorothy L. Sayers, a theopoet ahead of her time. Modernist versus postmodern poetic practices My distinction between modernist and postmodern theopoetics parallels the difference between high modernist and postmodern attitudes about poetry. Central to the distinction is the concept of autonomy. High modernism was spawned by the copulation of Cartesian rationalism and Lockean empiricism in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, who defined enlightenment as “the courage to use your own intelligence.” As Stanley Grenz once put it, Kant “believed that the burden of discovering truth is ultimately a private matter, that the knowing process is fundamentally a relationship between the autonomous knowing self and the world waiting to be known.”1 While Kant privileged reason as the engine driving the autonomous knowing self, the 19th century Romantic poets elevated imagination as the primary power energizing the autonomous perceiver. By the 20th century, autonomy was associated with the poetic artifact itself. In the 1950s, novelist E. M. Forster asserted that a true poem “points to nothing but itself,” while literary critic Northrop Fry proclaimed the importance “of producing a structure of words for its own sake,” calling such a structure “autonomous.”2 Even poetic style was meant to be autonomous, as implied by the 20th century neologism “free verse.” Entering the English language in 1908, free verse was a translation of the French vers libre, first used in 1902 (OED). Modernist advocates of free verse eschewed conventional forms like the sonnet or the sestina, refusing to follow any rhyme scheme or pre‐established rhythm whatsoever. Ezra Pound, whose 1914 anthology Des Imagistes became the cynosure of the new poetics, preached a principle that became the creed of high modernism: “Make It New!” By celebrating free verse as free from the prejudice of traditional styles, Pound illustrates Gadamer’s famous aphorism about modernism: “the prejudice against prejudice.” Dominating poetics for much of the twentieth century, “Make It New” became the modernist tradition against tradition. Postmodernism, of course, problematized this tradition. Establishing that all practices—whether poetic, scientific, historical, political, or theological—are embedded...

Though poststructuralist discourse still revels in its Verbal Iconoclasm with post-- Wimsatt whimsy, the New Critical legacy of close is still part of the liturgy of literature classrooms across the country. For good reason many would say; the ability to train one's eye upon the self-reflexive text leads to heightened interpretive acuity; even deconstruction, at least in its Anglo- American form, is a type of close reading, differing only in that it yields mise en abyme rather than the mise en scene of a Verbal Icon. The epigraph above displays how I used to write. Though I still believe what those words say, I now wince at my ostentatious style, regarding it as a mask of erudition, covering over my identity as an insecure graduate student fascinated by the of literary texts. Fortunately, identity was discovered in the academy of the 1990s-to such an extent that a referential change has occurred in self-reflexivity. The term once indexed the self-ironizing gestures within a text that were exfoliated through close readings-not only by practitioners of the New Criticism, who mystified the autonomous text, but also through the decentering moves of deconstruction, wherein textual signifiers drew attention to their own deficiencies. Today, however, self-reflexivity often refers to the situatedness of a reader who self-consciously discusses how personal experiences affect his or her response to a text. Feminists within the academy have been especially open to telling their life stories as a counterbalance to traditional (male) criticism. In its most radical manifestation, feminist generates lesbian 11 perverse readings, which, in the words of Bonnie Zimmerman, resist heterotexts by privately rewriting and thus appropriating them as lesbian texts, cutting a hole in the narrative labyrinth as the lesbian reader follows her own path (1991, 89). The repositioning of self-reflexivity has its detractors, even among feminist scholars. Shoshana Felman sees danger in becoming resistant readers the sake of ... our ideologies and preconceptions (be they chauvinist or feminist), because resistant often ends up resisting reading (1993, 6). Judith Butler regards the identity politics often associated with self-- reflexive feminist dicourse as reflecting a foundationalism which presumes, fixes, and constrains the very 'subjects' that it hopes to represent and liberate (1996, 374). And Daphne Patai has gone so far as to dub the drive for self-disclosure among scholars the nouveau solipsism (1994, A52). Meanwhile, attention has returned to New Criticism's brand of self-reflesivity through Susan Wolfson's book on Romantic formalism, which resuscitates the likes of John Crowe Ransom, Cleanth Brooks, Rene Wellek, and Allen Tate. And even though many in the academy today dismiss deconstruction as a scholarly skeleton, Derrida is still very much alive. The difficult doubleness of was captured two decades ago by Norman Rabkin, as he sought to describe the critical theory of his day: Jacques Derrida and his deconstructive allies see language and art as so intractably self-reflexive as to be incapable of analyzable significance; Harold Bloom argues that all is misreading, that one reads well only to find oneself in the mirror (1981, 1). I employ both kinds of in this essay--personal and textual--in order to discuss the self-reflexive teaching voice as it guides college students through close readings of the self-reflexive text. I hope to show that, just as my criticism once masked my identity, so also did my teaching, with problematic results. My first job outside of graduate school was a lectureship in Shakespeare at a well-known university, where I encouraged my students to be close readers, requiring them to quote the script in order to argue against the oft-held criticisms that Richard III pandered to the Tudor Myth, that Taming of the Shrew was sexist, and that The Merchant of Venice was anti-Semitic. …

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Multiplicity: Una Vista de Nada Crystal Downing Multiplicity. Dir. Harold Ramis. Columbia Pictures, 1996. Multiplicity, a showcase containing entertaining displays of Michael Keaton’s acting range, is not a great film. The showcase itself, however, with its startling lack of depth, reflects off its slick surfaces the postmodern “transvaluation of values” that Fredric Jameson descried years ago in his now famous New Left Review article.1 Multiplicity (directed and co-written by Harold Ramis, of Animal House and Ghostbusters fame) is not a “postmodern film” in the sense that it develops “new rules of the game” which devalue the hegemonic perceptions and semiotic practices that encode mainstream movies (à la Lyotard); instead, it is a stylistically traditional entertainment vehicle whose content reflects the ineluctable power of what Jameson has called “the cultural logic of late capitalism,” wherein “depth is replaced by...multiple surfaces” (J 62). In the film, Keaton plays Doug Kinney, a beleaguered, though conscientious, foreman for a construction company, married to the lovely, though lackluster, Laura (Andie MacDowell) who put her career on hold to mother their two young children. Doug’s multiplicity of stressful responsibilities leave him no time to finish remodelling his own home, to help out with the kids so Laura can return to work, or to engage in any leisure activity whatsoever. After a tantrum-like display of frustration on one of his many job sites—a “scientific” institute on the Malibu shore—Doug meets Dr. Owen Leeds (Harris Yulin), who, with no compunction at all, offers to clone for (and from) Doug a second self who can help him on the job. With a gesture toward Keaton’s eponymous role in Mr. Mom (1983), Doug soon discovers that, even with his professional activities alleviated, running a home with children still allows him no leisure time, so he has a second clone made to handle the house chores. These two clones then clone a fourth Doug to help out with the housework in their own apartment above the garage (which, though in full sight of the house, is never detected by Doug’s family as housing three not-very quiet look-alikes). This third clone, extracted not from the original Doug but from one of his clones, turns out to be a near idiot: “You know how sometimes when you make a copy of a copy, it’s not quite as sharp as the original?” Doug’s first two clones explain. “Original” is the operative word here and signals a problematizing not only of “origins,” but also of the autonomous, unified, “authentic” self of modernism. The film itself mocks the mystifications of modernism when Doug first goes to Dr. Leeds’ office to discuss his problems. We cut to a full-screen picture of Doug’s talking head lying on a black leather couch, spilling out his frustrations to the “doctor.” As soon as we recognize this icon of psychoanalysis, it is undermined by Dr. Leeds’ response to Doug: “I’m not a psychologist.” Modernism’s depth model of the human psyche—which must be plumbed to discover the “origin” of behavior—is decentered by Dr. Leeds’ solution: a replication of the body, the surface of behavior. We have here what Jameson describes as the postmodern “shift in the dynamics of cultural pathology...in which the alienation of the subject is displaced by the fragmentation of the subject” (J 63). The displacement of identity is reinforced by a trick the film plays on its audience: we see Doug, after the first cloning operation, waking up on a gurney to stare at an image of himself standing in the shadows. Because the camera looks over the shoulder of the well-lit Doug on the gurney to view the darker image which stands before him (and us), we identify with the waking man, amazed to see a replicant before him. However, we quickly learn that the man with whom we have “identified” is actually the clone. It is as though we have been given a visual instantiation of the de-centered self which defines postmodern subjectivity. Multiplicity quite consciously explores Doug’s fragmented subjectivity by giving each clone a different manifestation of his “personality.” Made while Doug was...