Students majoring in English get acquainted with Williams' text in the course "introduction to Literary Studies". Some frequently asked questions are : "What makes it a poem ?" "Wouldn't anybody be able to write such a text ?" Some students indeed get personally involved. They respond to litterature, either in verse, or in prose, sometimes through rewriting texts and sometimes in the traditional way, through literary analysis and research. This book testifies to the fact that they indeed have something to say.
Toward the end of the twentieth century, in art as well as ritual studies, cultural turns contributed to elaborating a broad definition of ritual and rituality. Rituality is now generally regarded as one of the master keys to understanding not only cultures in general but also arts in particular. Poetic rituality sheds light on the liminal characteristics of the art form and references to ritual practices, ritual forms and structures that are set in motion in a way that allows special aesthetic characteristics and semantic aspects to arise. The contributors to the volume - theatre and literary studies scholars as well as students from Yale, Bielefeld, Károli University, and the Grotowski Institute - had the opportunity to share their related works in the course of several recent international academic events.
The present volume offers an interdisciplinary collection of twenty-four studies to readers interested in the religious, philosophical and artistic aspects of initiation. In itself, the concept of initiation presupposes that there is an initiator, someone to be initiated, and secret rite or knoweledge-in short, a mystery-into which the elect few would be admitted and which must not be revealed to the rest. Initiation is thus very personal, as it encompasses-in Christian theology at least-an encounter with God but also involves a communal experience. While in European context, initiation is an essentially Christian idea, not all the papers of the present volume turn to the Christian tradition for sources. Hermetism, Neoplatonism, pre-Christian paganism and Renaissance esotericism also find a place among the studies published here. Religion and philosophy are not the only viewpoints adopted by our authors, however; the section on art and litterature discusses initiation as it appears on stage, in novels, short stories, and drama as well as poetry, especially in modern European literature.
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