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Traherne in Dialogue: Heidegger, Lacan, and Derrida
A. Leigh DeNeef
A bold act of critical matchmaking: the Duke scholar A. Leigh DeNeef reads Thomas Traherne — the rapturous seventeenth-century poet of childhood, wonder, and divine plenitude — through the lenses of Heidegger, Lacan, and Derrida. The claim runs in both directions. Traherne, DeNeef argues, becomes newly legible when approached with modern theory's questions about being, desire, and language; and the notoriously difficult theorists become more accessible when put to work on a concrete, luminous body of devotional poetry. It is a properly scholarly book, dense with close reading and continental philosophy, and it belongs to that late-1980s moment when literary theory was remaking how earlier literature could be read.
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The author
A. Leigh DeNeef was a professor of English at Duke University, a scholar of the English Renaissance who also wrote on Spenser and on the theory of literary study. He works here as an insider to both worlds — the seventeenth-century devotional tradition and the high theory of the 1980s — trying to make each speak to the other.
The subject
Thomas Traherne (c. 1637–1674) is one of literature's great latecomers: an English clergyman-poet whose ecstatic manuscripts lay unknown for two centuries and were only discovered and published around the turn of the twentieth century, after which he took his place among the metaphysical poets. His themes — infancy, innocence, the world seen as sheer gift — make him an unexpectedly rich partner for phenomenology.
The book
Published in 1988 by Duke University Press, roughly 300 pages. It is built as a series of dialogues pairing Traherne's poems and prose meditations with Heidegger (being and dwelling), Lacan (desire and the subject), and Derrida (language and difference).
How it reads
As ambitious, specialist, and of its theoretical moment. Whether the theory illuminates Traherne or occasionally overwrites him is exactly the question the book invites; either way it is a serious, sustained encounter.
For more context
Traherne's own Centuries of Meditations and the Dobell poems; and the wider 1980s project of reading Renaissance literature through Continental philosophy.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- A. Leigh DeNeef
- Publisher
- Duke
- Place of publication
- Durham, North Carolina
- ISBN
- 0-8223-0832-0
- Format
- Hardcover
- Shelf
- Poetry
- Location
- Maine