Thomas Berenato | University of Virginia (original) (raw)

Dissertation Abstract by Thomas Berenato

This project shows that a creative confrontation with the Christian theology of forgiveness is th... more This project shows that a creative confrontation with the Christian theology of forgiveness is the blueprint of radical formal experiments that some important British poets perform during the Romantic, Victorian, and Modernist periods. It proposes an alternative genealogy of the changes that these poets make to the appearance of the printed page of poetry through those years and explores the consequences of their innovations for the character of prose and verse in English after the First World War. The argument takes their verbal and visual work together and derives its primary insights from close study of their respective manuscript archives.

Papers by Thomas Berenato

Historicizing Modernists: Approaches to "Archivalism", 2021

Assigned to 'battalion nuclear reserve', 1 the English poet David Jones (1895-1974) saw the worst... more Assigned to 'battalion nuclear reserve', 1 the English poet David Jones (1895-1974) saw the worst of the Battle of Pilckem Ridge, in July and August 1917, from behind the front lines. But these grimmest days of the First World War would inspire a poem Jones began in the mid-1930s after completing a draft of his first book, In Parenthesis (1937), about the Somme, July 1916, in which he had been wounded. This new work, The Book of Balaam's Ass, attempts expiation of survivor's guilt. It celebrates the 'baptism by cowardice' of one Private Shenkin (Private Jones in the drafts), a Chaplinesque antihero who emerges from the horror unscathed thanks to his good misfortune to fall into a shell-hole during the assault. 2 Jones 'abandoned' the thirty-five-page typescript, 'as it would not come together', but he included two fragments as the first and last items in his final book, The Sleeping Lord (1974). 3 Thomas Goldpaugh, the most recent editor of Jones's unpublished poetry, has shown that Jones built his poems from the inside out by splitting them open and stuffing material of other origin inside. 4 Goldpaugh argues that almost everything Jones wrote after In Parenthesis belongs to a single vast work the relationship of whose parts to the whole Jones reconceived down the decades. The instance of a new page of verse, and its accompanying footnotes, that Jones added to the Balaam's Ass typescript in 1971 serves as this essay's point of departure for a global account of Jones's compositional practice. The argument arises from an analysis of documents in the Jones archives at the Burns Library, Boston College, and the National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth. Jones's interpolational procedure undermines the analogy that Jones, and most of his commentators taking him at his word, draws between poiesis, or artefacture, and anamnesis, the action of the priest during the Catholic Eucharistic rite. This essay suggests that the Sacrament of Penance and Reconciliation instead of the Eucharist models more exactly the way Jones's poetry makes its effect. Forgiveness administers a shock to the analogical imagination on which anamnesis depends. In forgiveness the past and present are no longer understood as continuous with one another. Rather, in forgiveness, what was is sprung loose from its place in the temporal continuum and confronted directly with what is in the present. Unlike 8

The Hopkins Quarterly, 2019

The Hopkins Quarterly, 2018

Religion & Literature, 2017

Winner of the 2014 Patrick Scott Prize for Best Graduate Paper

Teaching Documents by Thomas Berenato

The New Yorker magazine (see me to set up your digital student subscription) ASSIGNMENTS Discussi... more The New Yorker magazine (see me to set up your digital student subscription) ASSIGNMENTS Discussion (40%); 500-word article (15%); 1,500-word article (20%); 2,000-word article (25%)

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (Dover, ISBN 9780486281223) William Blake, Songs of Innocence (Do... more The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (Dover, ISBN 9780486281223) William Blake, Songs of Innocence (Dover, ISBN 9780486227641) William Blake, Songs of Experience (Dover, ISBN 9780486246369) Basil Bunting, Briggflatts (Bloodaxe, ISBN 9781852248260)

s Secret (Vintage Books, ISBN 978-0-375-70804-6) Philip Roth, Goodbye, Columbus & Five Short Stor... more s Secret (Vintage Books, ISBN 978-0-375-70804-6) Philip Roth, Goodbye, Columbus & Five Short Stories (Vintage Books, ISBN 978-0679748267) Simon Wiesenthal, The Sunflower, Revised and Expanded (Schocken, ISBN 978-0-8052-1060-6) Richard Wright, Black Boy (HarperPerennial Modern Classics P.S., ISBN 978-0-06-113024-3) RECOMMENDED TEXTBOOK Francis-Noël Thomas and Mark Turner, Clear and Simple as the Truth, Second Edition (Princeton UP, ISBN 978-0-691-14743-7) [abbreviated below as C&S]

Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads (Oxford UP, ISBN 978-0-19-960196-7) Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (N... more Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads (Oxford UP, ISBN 978-0-19-960196-7) Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (Norton, ISBN 978-0-393-97889-6) Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh (Oxford UP, ISBN 978-0-19-955233-7) Walt Whitman, Drum-Taps (NYRB, ISBN 978-1-59017-862-1) Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Major Works (Oxford UP ed., ISBN 978-0-19-953885-0) Thomas Hardy, The Well-Beloved (Penguin, ISBN 978-0-14-043519-1) William Carlos Williams, Spring and All (New Directions Pearls, facsimile ed., ISBN 978-0-8112-1891-7) David Jones, In Parenthesis (NYRB, ISBN 978-1-59017-036-6) W. H. Auden, The Sea and the Mirror (Princeton UP, ISBN 978-0-691-12384-4) Ben Lerner, The Lichtenberg Figures (Copper Canyon Press, ISBN 978-1-55659-211-9) Maggie Nelson, Bluets (Wave Books, second printing ed., ISBN 978-1-933517-40-7) Maureen McLane, This Blue (FSG, ISBN 978-0-374-53519-3) Claudia Rankine, Citizen (Graywolf, ISBN 978-1-55597-690-3)

The Norton Shakespeare (2015 third edition; ISBN 978-0-393-93499-1)

s Secret (Vintage Books, ISBN 978-0-375-70804-6) Francis-Noël Thomas and Mark Turner, Clear and S... more s Secret (Vintage Books, ISBN 978-0-375-70804-6) Francis-Noël Thomas and Mark Turner, Clear and Simple as the Truth, Second Edition (Princeton UP, ISBN 978-0-691-14743-7) [abbreviated below as C&S] Simon Wiesenthal, The Sunflower, Revised and Expanded (Schocken, ISBN 978-0-8052-1060-6) Richard Wright, Black Boy (HarperPerennial Modern Classics P.S., ISBN 978-0-06-113024-3)

Book Reviews by Thomas Berenato

Religion & Literature, 2017

This project shows that a creative confrontation with the Christian theology of forgiveness is th... more This project shows that a creative confrontation with the Christian theology of forgiveness is the blueprint of radical formal experiments that some important British poets perform during the Romantic, Victorian, and Modernist periods. It proposes an alternative genealogy of the changes that these poets make to the appearance of the printed page of poetry through those years and explores the consequences of their innovations for the character of prose and verse in English after the First World War. The argument takes their verbal and visual work together and derives its primary insights from close study of their respective manuscript archives.

Historicizing Modernists: Approaches to "Archivalism", 2021

Assigned to 'battalion nuclear reserve', 1 the English poet David Jones (1895-1974) saw the worst... more Assigned to 'battalion nuclear reserve', 1 the English poet David Jones (1895-1974) saw the worst of the Battle of Pilckem Ridge, in July and August 1917, from behind the front lines. But these grimmest days of the First World War would inspire a poem Jones began in the mid-1930s after completing a draft of his first book, In Parenthesis (1937), about the Somme, July 1916, in which he had been wounded. This new work, The Book of Balaam's Ass, attempts expiation of survivor's guilt. It celebrates the 'baptism by cowardice' of one Private Shenkin (Private Jones in the drafts), a Chaplinesque antihero who emerges from the horror unscathed thanks to his good misfortune to fall into a shell-hole during the assault. 2 Jones 'abandoned' the thirty-five-page typescript, 'as it would not come together', but he included two fragments as the first and last items in his final book, The Sleeping Lord (1974). 3 Thomas Goldpaugh, the most recent editor of Jones's unpublished poetry, has shown that Jones built his poems from the inside out by splitting them open and stuffing material of other origin inside. 4 Goldpaugh argues that almost everything Jones wrote after In Parenthesis belongs to a single vast work the relationship of whose parts to the whole Jones reconceived down the decades. The instance of a new page of verse, and its accompanying footnotes, that Jones added to the Balaam's Ass typescript in 1971 serves as this essay's point of departure for a global account of Jones's compositional practice. The argument arises from an analysis of documents in the Jones archives at the Burns Library, Boston College, and the National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth. Jones's interpolational procedure undermines the analogy that Jones, and most of his commentators taking him at his word, draws between poiesis, or artefacture, and anamnesis, the action of the priest during the Catholic Eucharistic rite. This essay suggests that the Sacrament of Penance and Reconciliation instead of the Eucharist models more exactly the way Jones's poetry makes its effect. Forgiveness administers a shock to the analogical imagination on which anamnesis depends. In forgiveness the past and present are no longer understood as continuous with one another. Rather, in forgiveness, what was is sprung loose from its place in the temporal continuum and confronted directly with what is in the present. Unlike 8

The Hopkins Quarterly, 2019

The Hopkins Quarterly, 2018

Religion & Literature, 2017

Winner of the 2014 Patrick Scott Prize for Best Graduate Paper

The New Yorker magazine (see me to set up your digital student subscription) ASSIGNMENTS Discussi... more The New Yorker magazine (see me to set up your digital student subscription) ASSIGNMENTS Discussion (40%); 500-word article (15%); 1,500-word article (20%); 2,000-word article (25%)

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (Dover, ISBN 9780486281223) William Blake, Songs of Innocence (Do... more The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (Dover, ISBN 9780486281223) William Blake, Songs of Innocence (Dover, ISBN 9780486227641) William Blake, Songs of Experience (Dover, ISBN 9780486246369) Basil Bunting, Briggflatts (Bloodaxe, ISBN 9781852248260)

s Secret (Vintage Books, ISBN 978-0-375-70804-6) Philip Roth, Goodbye, Columbus & Five Short Stor... more s Secret (Vintage Books, ISBN 978-0-375-70804-6) Philip Roth, Goodbye, Columbus & Five Short Stories (Vintage Books, ISBN 978-0679748267) Simon Wiesenthal, The Sunflower, Revised and Expanded (Schocken, ISBN 978-0-8052-1060-6) Richard Wright, Black Boy (HarperPerennial Modern Classics P.S., ISBN 978-0-06-113024-3) RECOMMENDED TEXTBOOK Francis-Noël Thomas and Mark Turner, Clear and Simple as the Truth, Second Edition (Princeton UP, ISBN 978-0-691-14743-7) [abbreviated below as C&S]

Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads (Oxford UP, ISBN 978-0-19-960196-7) Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (N... more Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads (Oxford UP, ISBN 978-0-19-960196-7) Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (Norton, ISBN 978-0-393-97889-6) Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh (Oxford UP, ISBN 978-0-19-955233-7) Walt Whitman, Drum-Taps (NYRB, ISBN 978-1-59017-862-1) Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Major Works (Oxford UP ed., ISBN 978-0-19-953885-0) Thomas Hardy, The Well-Beloved (Penguin, ISBN 978-0-14-043519-1) William Carlos Williams, Spring and All (New Directions Pearls, facsimile ed., ISBN 978-0-8112-1891-7) David Jones, In Parenthesis (NYRB, ISBN 978-1-59017-036-6) W. H. Auden, The Sea and the Mirror (Princeton UP, ISBN 978-0-691-12384-4) Ben Lerner, The Lichtenberg Figures (Copper Canyon Press, ISBN 978-1-55659-211-9) Maggie Nelson, Bluets (Wave Books, second printing ed., ISBN 978-1-933517-40-7) Maureen McLane, This Blue (FSG, ISBN 978-0-374-53519-3) Claudia Rankine, Citizen (Graywolf, ISBN 978-1-55597-690-3)

The Norton Shakespeare (2015 third edition; ISBN 978-0-393-93499-1)

s Secret (Vintage Books, ISBN 978-0-375-70804-6) Francis-Noël Thomas and Mark Turner, Clear and S... more s Secret (Vintage Books, ISBN 978-0-375-70804-6) Francis-Noël Thomas and Mark Turner, Clear and Simple as the Truth, Second Edition (Princeton UP, ISBN 978-0-691-14743-7) [abbreviated below as C&S] Simon Wiesenthal, The Sunflower, Revised and Expanded (Schocken, ISBN 978-0-8052-1060-6) Richard Wright, Black Boy (HarperPerennial Modern Classics P.S., ISBN 978-0-06-113024-3)

Religion & Literature, 2017

Review of Bankes & Hills, Vision and Memory: The Art of David Jones (Lund Humphries, 2015)

Review of Zaleski & Zaleski, The Fellowship

Review for the Los Angeles Review of Books of Thomas Kunkel's biography of Joseph Mitchell

With commentary and annotation throughout, this book makes available for the first time previousl... more With commentary and annotation throughout, this book makes available for the first time previously unpublished writings by the influential modernist poet David Jones, including statements on Hitler, art, and faith.