https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1297-3040
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Daniel Boscaljon, Lands of Likeness: For a Poetics of Contemplation. By Kevin Hart, Literature and Theology, Volume 38, Issue 3, September 2024, Pages 266–267, https://doi.org/10.1093/litthe/frae026
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Extract
The magnificent Lands of Likeness: For a Poetics of Contemplation (2023), is largely the result of Kevin Hart—a pioneering interdisciplinary scholar known for his work in religion and literature—accepting the challenge of the Gifford Lectures, and the mandate to discuss natural theology. Hart thus begins his book by arguing that “the study of Romantic and post-Romantic poetry is a natural theology…not concerned narrowly to establish truth but to reflect on it” (p. 12). This occurs in the first three chapters of the book, as Hart weaves together the religious tradition of contemplation (particularly through a study of Richard of St. Victor) with post-romantic philosophy (Schopenhauer, Coleridge, and Husserl) to create an imaginative hermeneutic of contemplation. The hermeneutic of contemplation is designed to cultivate a spacious reading that incorporates suspicions into a larger whole (p. 155), looking at (rather than through) what appears toward understanding, rather than merely interpretation (p. 324). Contemplation is the “end of criticism…tied to the world, not anything beyond it” (p. 10). Further philosophical rigor in Chapters 5 and 6 allows Hart to distinguish the practice of contemplation from fascination (which erases reflective distance) and consideration (which attends to the unknown).
