Content Category
Literary Criticism
Abstract/Description
Mary Szybist’s 2013 National Book Award–winning poetry collection, Incarnadine, re-envisions the encounter between Mary and the angel Gabriel, entering the same thematic space that early Annunciation artwork traditionally has in order to portray the human encountering the alien. In these poems, symbol systems—particularly metaphor and sometimes language itself—allow the speaker to approach understanding without full comprehension. In reexamining, rupturing, and recombining traditional elements of Annunciation representations and the respective tenets of Marian theology they signified, the poems in Incarnadine point to the persistent inadequacy but inescapable necessity of metaphor in the process of meaning-making. After briefly describing the history of Annunciation artwork and detailing its traditional iconography, I will explore Szybist’s feminist critique of Marian theology and relate her conclusion that metaphor is unreliable but ultimately necessary in order to approach the unknown.
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Location
4101 JFSB
Start Date
20-3-2015 10:15 AM
End Date
20-3-2015 11:45 AM
Included in
“My wonderful and less than”: The Inadequacy and Necessity of Metaphor in Szybist’s Incarnadine
4101 JFSB
Mary Szybist’s 2013 National Book Award–winning poetry collection, Incarnadine, re-envisions the encounter between Mary and the angel Gabriel, entering the same thematic space that early Annunciation artwork traditionally has in order to portray the human encountering the alien. In these poems, symbol systems—particularly metaphor and sometimes language itself—allow the speaker to approach understanding without full comprehension. In reexamining, rupturing, and recombining traditional elements of Annunciation representations and the respective tenets of Marian theology they signified, the poems in Incarnadine point to the persistent inadequacy but inescapable necessity of metaphor in the process of meaning-making. After briefly describing the history of Annunciation artwork and detailing its traditional iconography, I will explore Szybist’s feminist critique of Marian theology and relate her conclusion that metaphor is unreliable but ultimately necessary in order to approach the unknown.