Bainard Cowan recently sent me (Jessica Hooten Wilson) a draft of his mother Louise Cowan’s lecture on Dostoevsky’s “Christian Imagination,” in which she notes the predilection of early readers of his novels to be “scandalized at his work” for its sacramental form “and have attributed his penetrating analysis of the soul in his novels to a derangement of personality.” Such a note reminds me of the response to the 1934 discovery of the fourteenth-century autobiography of Margery Kempe, whose zeal for God led many a Freudian to diagnose her with a dozen complexes. Or, how critics of Flannery O’Connor continue to misread her to this day, assuming her incarnational depictions to be merely grotesque or nihilistic horror, whereas Mark Bosco and Elizabeth Coffman’s film Flannery (shown at the Loyola-Chicago CIC 2019) portray her as plunging deeply into reality.
Although Dostoevsky was not a Roman Catholic (and does not depict the medieval church well in The Brothers Karamazov), his form aligns more with Dante and O’Connor, as Cowan indicates, than with his contemporaries, such as Tolstoy and Turgenev. In contrast to his fellow Russian writers, Dostoevsky institutes a higher realism, what Paul Contino, who will be hosting an interview with Chris Beha at the CIC 2022, calls an “incarnational” aesthetic in his recent book Dostoevsky’s Incarnational Realism.
The Catholic Imagination Conference is about promoting literature and art that is as incarnational as Dostoevsky’s work, where, as Cowan writes, “Form is meaning.” We are celebrating those writers who have participated and continue this tradition, from Dante forward.
Yet, Dante is a poet, not a novelist. As many other artists as Dante has inspired, the polysemous form of The Divine Comedy has cultivated a legacy of imitative poets. We’ll be hosting a Dante panel, which includes the poet Angela Alaimo O’Donnell who has written a series of poems “Talking Back to Dante,” in celebration of the 700th anniversary of his death.
In addition to O’Donnell, other writers have paid tribute to Dante’s anniversary. There has been a worldwide book club on Dante this past year, 100 Days of Dante, led in part by Anthony Nussmeier, who will be presenting at CIC. The Hank Center hosted “Why Dante Matters Today” with O’Donnell, Fr. Stephen Gregg, Randy Boyagoda and Paul Mariani, several of whom are featured at this year’s CIC. The Sacred and Profane Love Podcast (sponsored by Institute for Humane Ecology, one of the sponsors of CIC) dedicated a series of episodes to the Comedy.
Mary Jo Bang has a controversial new translation out on Dante, which I’m sure will be debated during our session on translation and the Catholic imagination, with Jason Baxter (who is translation The Divine Comedy), Fred Turner (Faust), Jeannine Pitas (Selva Casal), and Michial Farmer (Thirst).
The beauty of the Catholic imagination is how expansive it is, including writers from Dante to Dostoevsky to Flannery O’Connor and Randy Boyagoda. That’s what we celebrate every two years and what we look forward to toasting in September 2022! We hope you’ll join us. Consider sponsoring a session, bringing your class of students, your faculty, or book club with you. Until then, happy reading.