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- Title
The Sleep of Christ: Incarnation and the Queerness of Heresy in W. H. Auden's "For the Time Being".
- Authors
Soni, Raji Singh
- Abstract
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-corporealism--whose roots lie in his considerable exposure to Soren Kierkegaard's religious existentialism. This article reads Auden's persistent elisions of Christ's body in "For the Time Being" vis-a-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.
- Subjects
FOR the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio (Poem); AUDEN, W. H. (Wystan Hugh), 1907-1973; HUMAN body in literature; RELIGION &; poetry; KIERKEGAARD, Soren, 1813-1855; ALTHAUS-Reid, Marcella; QUEER theology
- Publication
Religion & the Arts, 2014, Vol 18, Issue 4, p543
- ISSN
1079-9265
- Publication type
Poetry Review
- DOI
10.1163/15685292-01804004