The art of Longing - Poetics of Desire and the Language of Mysticism
Date and Time
Mystical literature is shaped by two fundamental longings: the desire for the Beloved, who inhabits an unreachable realm, and the desire for a language capable of expressing an ineffable experience, despite its inherent limitations. This conference explores how these two intertwined forms of longing became consolidated in literature, and how, through successive processes of secularisation and conceptual displacement, their central motifs and expressive strategies have travelled across literary history to find new configurations in contemporary literature. Through a selection of texts and poems spanning different historical periods (the Song of Songs, Hadewijch of Antwerp, John of the Cross, Ángela Segovia or Angélica Liddell), we will trace the transformations of mystical literary language and explore how the changing relationship between desire and expression reveals broader historical shifts in the ways literature articulates longing, transcendence and the possibilities of language.
Speaker: Bárbara Arango Serrano (FPU PhD candidate, Departamentos de Lengua Española y Teoría de la Literatura y Literaturas Hispánicas y Bibliografía, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain)