PROVO, Utah (May 1, 2014)—Brigham Young University Spanish professor Greg Stallings isn’t just interested in grading Spanish papers. In fact, his interest in literary criticism led him to be one of the contributing editors of “Material Spirit: Religion and Literature Intranscendent,” published by one of the leading publishers of literary criticism, Fordham University Press.
At a Humanities Center colloquium featuring Stallings and his research, Stallings explained that “Material Spirit” is a collection of 10 annotated essays. “The authors in this collection were given a simple invitation – to write on the topic, or paradox, of material spirit and to speak to contemporary concerns in the study of religion.”
The selected essays came from a variety of disciplines; however, Stallings said, “There were three themes that kept bubbling up to the surface: immanence, subversion and subjective displacements.”
Stallings briefly summarized each of the essays within the book, showing how each essay captured one of the themes. For example, Burcht Pranger’s “Renunciation and Absorption: On the Dimensionality of Baroque Dimensions” explores realism within mystical art. Stallings said that Pranger’s take on baroque realism is that art seems so real it threatens to absorb the viewer rather than figure a mystical possibility.
“All of the essays talk about transcendence as something that goes beyond, and they describe immanence as going down rather than going up,” Stallings said.
Manuel Asensi’s essay, “The Third Life of Saint Teresa of Jesus,” relates to many themes within Stallings’ own research interests. He explained, “Asensi’s close reading of a famous poem by Saint Teresa combines all three of these recurring themes. “We encounter a fractured subject who turns from a transcendent God into a immanent one,” Stallings said.
While it’s an immanent experience, it’s also a fractured one. Stallings explained, “Asensi claims that Saint Teresa turns out to be a radical saboteur of language, opening language to a field of schizoid madness – as together God and the mystic throw a dart at human language. This leads to my own research. Who are the saboteurs? Asensi sees the literary critic as a kind of saboteur.”
He continued, “It has to do with the idea that all kinds of texts bombard us. As we see a movie, read a book or magazine, listen to a song, etc., we are unconsciously bombarded by emotions and perceptions, and occasionally we act on those emotions.”
Stallings used the example of Don Quijote from Spanish literature. Don Quijote wanted to be a character in a book, and eventually he became one. “One way or another, Cervantes makes himself heard. It’s beyond the death of the author,” Stallings said.
With another Spanish-language novel, “The Absent City” by Ricardo Piglia
, Stallings said, “The way I read this novel has to do with the death of the author, but a film noir version of it. In ‘The Absent City,’ it’s the death of the detective – you’re reading the story and then all of the sudden the detective disappears.”
Stallings said that the idea of the author disappears, but there are some traces of some kind of author. “For years, I’ve been working on jazz in film noir and how these things come together.”
He explained that in Piglia’s story “El Pianista,” the author uses music within the text. “I see these musical passages as going against the death of the author. Music goes in a different direction. If you think about jazz, it’s all about community.”
In “El Pianista,” the pianist character plays songs early in the text as a performative act. “The character listens to the song and follows it,” Stallings said. “It’s this idea that music is forming subjectivities.”
“That’s kind of my direction with music and noir,” Stallings said. “Noir has to do with the death of the subject while music is about bringing people together.”
During the colloquium, Stallings demonstrated this notion of music bringing together past and present, as well as the combination and dialogue of various subjects, by playing some jazz music. With Stallings on the flute and Professor Erik Larson on the upright bass, they played a jazz tune. Larson explained, “We’re listening to what the other person is trying to say and dialoguing with it.” Stallings added that this type of music creates commonalities across cultures.
“While noir is about the disappearance of the subject, music is about bringing individuals together and community,” Stallings said. The two traditions come together in many contemporary Hispanic works of film and novel noir.”
Stallings’ research within Spanish and literary criticism, and the publication of “Material Spirit,” combine to ask interesting questions about the paradoxes and conversations occurring within various subjects and aspects in the Humanities.
—By Stephanie Bahr Bentley BA English ’14