Eternity's Ennui
Temporality, Perseverance and Voice in Augustine and Western Literature
Biographical note
M.B. Pranger, Ph.D. (1975), University of Amsterdam, is Professor emeritus at the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Amsterdam. He has published extensively on the literary aspects of monasticism (Bernard of Clairvaux and the Shape of Monastic Thought (Brill, 1994), The Artificiality of Christianity (Stanford, 2003).
Readership
All those interested in intellectual history, the history and theology of Christianity, Augustinian studies, literary studies, literary theory, comparative literature.
Reviews
"Pranger has written a dense and difficult book of striking originality [...] this is a book that richly deserves to transform the disciplines it so tactfully subverts." James Wetzel, The Journal of Religion Vol. 92, No. 1 (January 2012), pp. 143-145.
Table of contents
Acknowledgements
Preface
List of Abbreviations
Introduction: Rambling
1. Time, Focus and Narrative in Augustine’s Confessions
1.1. Introduction
1.2. Meijering, Sorbabji, Ricoeur
1.3. Time, narrative and emplotment
1.4. Long expectation, long memory
2. The Unfathomability of Sincerity: on the Seriousness of Augustine’s Confessions
2.1. Pawn, lease and promise: Stanley Cavell and the arrogation of voice
2.2. John Henry Newman: conversion and the exclusion of the non-serious
2.3. Augustine’s Confessions: the arrogation of voice and the promise of conversion
2.4. The promise of conversion and the return of voice
2.5. Jokes and poetry
3. The Gift of Destiny and the Language of Dispossession
3.1. Introduction: the aporias of Augustinian predestination
3.2. The holy sinner
3.3. Calvin’s decretum horribile
3.4. The language of possession: Calvin continued
3.5. The language of dispossession: Dante on sloth as sin
3.6. The language of dispossession: Henry James
3.7. Dante’s cantos on the moon and Belaqua’s lobster
4. The Sustainability of Voice
4.1. The epiphany of Scripture
4.2. A grief observed
4.3. Politics and finitude
4.4. The human condition as nature morte
5. Eternity’s Ennui
5.1. Distentio animi and the hinterland of grace
5.2. The logic of terror: jokes and poetry revisited
5.3. The desire to become an Indian
5.4. Late style: sero te amavi
5.5. Non-perseverance and the boundaries of love’s lateness
5.6. Endgame
Bibliography
Index of Names
Preface
List of Abbreviations
Introduction: Rambling
1. Time, Focus and Narrative in Augustine’s Confessions
1.1. Introduction
1.2. Meijering, Sorbabji, Ricoeur
1.3. Time, narrative and emplotment
1.4. Long expectation, long memory
2. The Unfathomability of Sincerity: on the Seriousness of Augustine’s Confessions
2.1. Pawn, lease and promise: Stanley Cavell and the arrogation of voice
2.2. John Henry Newman: conversion and the exclusion of the non-serious
2.3. Augustine’s Confessions: the arrogation of voice and the promise of conversion
2.4. The promise of conversion and the return of voice
2.5. Jokes and poetry
3. The Gift of Destiny and the Language of Dispossession
3.1. Introduction: the aporias of Augustinian predestination
3.2. The holy sinner
3.3. Calvin’s decretum horribile
3.4. The language of possession: Calvin continued
3.5. The language of dispossession: Dante on sloth as sin
3.6. The language of dispossession: Henry James
3.7. Dante’s cantos on the moon and Belaqua’s lobster
4. The Sustainability of Voice
4.1. The epiphany of Scripture
4.2. A grief observed
4.3. Politics and finitude
4.4. The human condition as nature morte
5. Eternity’s Ennui
5.1. Distentio animi and the hinterland of grace
5.2. The logic of terror: jokes and poetry revisited
5.3. The desire to become an Indian
5.4. Late style: sero te amavi
5.5. Non-perseverance and the boundaries of love’s lateness
5.6. Endgame
Bibliography
Index of Names
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