... that the cynic and lyric met for Douglas as two forms of special knowing, the “combat gnosticism” of war poetry, and a parallel gnosticism in love lyric. Each proposes that a special experience can utterly transform a subject: the soldier’s kind of knowing transformed by battle experience, and the lover’s...

... and Difference 74 Is the root charge of poetry a power to partake of a Gnostic “version” of things, catastrophic events wherein we know truth by its downward turn? — Nathaniel Mackey, Paracritical Hinge 135 C o n fro n te d with Robert Duncan’s last...

... : Indiana University Press . Butler Judith . 2004 . Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence . London : Verso . Butler Judith . 2010 . Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? London : Verso . Campbell James . 1999 . “ Combat Gnosticism: The Ideology of First...

... and its scent of bodily corruption has suggested a Gnostic aesthetics that locates—and rejects—corruption (or original sin) in the heart of creation ( Adorno 1973 ; Moorjani 1991 ; and Parrott 2001 et al.). The dark theology of Gnosticism, however, cannot account for the refuge Beckett’s work offers...

..., as Oser indicates, of a “gnostic remove[d] from moral life” (123). It is true that The Waste Land predates by five years Eliot’s formal conversion to Christianity, and Oser identi- fies the Eliot of this poem as “a Christian skeptic” (83). But it seems to me unmistakable that the Eliot of The Waste...

... perhaps an even more fascinating figure, in that his moral vision for poetry depends on tropes and images of war and the military, all that to which he is other­ wise opposed. Despite his complex symbological system comprised of elements ranging from medieval history to Gnostic tracts...

... other works—extends also to mat­ ters of plot and character. And it is at this level that the book, for all its gnostic elements, engages with the ineluctably material “narrative of entry-permits and passports”: like a variety of modernist works—rang­ ing from Wyndham Lewis’s Tan...

... History of Neo-Liberalism. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. London: Blackwell, 1990. Hassan, Ihab. “The New Gnosticism: Speculations on an Aspect of the Post- modern Mind.” Early Postmodernism: Foundational...

.... The recognition of which Andahl speaks ostensibly follows from some Gnostic memory of the former linguistic utopia of Eden. Their desire is for perfect origins, for letters and words to operate as if the world were not fallen. Resisting a recalcitrant, contingent world beyond their control, they want...

... recounts in his 1889 es- say “Agnosticism” (correcting both Christian and secular misuses of the word) that when he came up with the term it was meant as “antithetic to the ‘gnostic’ of Church history, who professed to know so much about the very things of which I was ignorant” (239). Properly...