The theological poetics of conversion

This research project investigates the poetics of conversion within a broad chronological perspective, as it crosses boundaries of genres, social conditions, and national borders.

The background for the project is the diverse collection of texts which have described, urged, and communicated (wo)man’s conversion to God within a Christian context – reaching from early Christian texts such as Luke-Acts and Augustine’s Confessions to popular modern bestsellers such as Paulo Coelho’s The Pilgrimage. These texts have been written by high-ranking theologians and lay people, men and women alike, and appear in various genres such as biographies and autobiographies, allegorical texts, biblical texts, hymns, sermons, instructive texts, texts which are not specifically religious, and so on. What these different conversion texts have in common, however, is a pronounced fictive element and an explicit address to the reader within the text, positioning him or her as a potential candidate for conversion.

This project uses five examples to investigate how a poetics of conversion emerges within theology and literature from the late Middle Ages to English romanticism. By comparing texts by five different religious writers (Dante Alighieri, Margery Kempe, Jakob Boehme, John Bunyan, and S. T. Coleridge) the project discusses the nature of the conversion text, with a particular focus on the dynamics between apparently autobiographical elements (the ‘I’ of the text) and the address to the reader (the ‘you’ of the text).

By approaching the conversion text within a broad chronological perspective, and using the techniques of literary criticism, the project challenges the narrow definition of a conversion text (‘conversion narrative’) which is usually used in current scholarly literature. Instead of narrowing down the definition of the conversion text to only one particular genre, the project shows how the poetics of conversion comes to represent a particular mode within theology and literature which crosses genres and contexts – a mode which places itself in the interface between individual and collective identity, text and reader, tradition and innovation, and the question of how we can define a literary theological tradition.

The project is funded by the Danish Council for Independent Research/Humanities (FKK) and runs from 1 September 2013 to 31 August 2015.

Contact: Elisabeth Engell Jessen, eje@teol.ku.dk