The Flesh Made Text Made Flesh

The essays in The Flesh Made Text Made Flesh explore the complexities of modern and postmodern embodiment by drawing attention to a marked tendency in contemporary theory and cultural practice to «return» to flesh and redefine its limits, meanings, and potentialities. Engaging with issues as diverse as technologized performance, cosmetic surgery, and lifestyle TV, the essays in this collection raise crucial questions and open up new horizons for further research in current debates surrounding enfleshment. The cross-disciplinarity of this book, which can be used in undergraduate and postgraduate teaching, will attract the attention of scholars from a diversity of fields, such as literature, sociology, popular culture, art, theater, and film.

Calling attention to the visual materiality of the text, this book attempts to halt linear reading, trapping the eye in a field of letters which make a complex object on the page. The writing refers continually to the visceral character of language, literalizing metaphors of tongue, breath, and flesh. The work both embodies and discusses language as a physical form, one whose properties cannot be ignored by arriving at a disembodied content. The format of this work invokes a reference to the carmina figurata of the Renaissance -- works in which a sacred image was picked out in red letters against a field of black type so that a holy figure could be seen and meditated on in the process of reading. The technique is reversed here, with the red field of small type serving as a background in which large, black letters are arranged like figures on the red ground. This is a facsimile reprint of an original letterpress edition issued in 1989.

Most theologians believe that in the human life of Jesus of Nazareth, we encounter God. Yet how the divine and human come together in the life of Jesus still remains a question needing exploring. The Council of Chalcedon sought to answer the question by speaking of one and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, the same perfect in divinity and also perfect in humanity, the same truly God and truly a human being. But ever since Chalcedon, the theological conversation on Christology has implicitly put Christs divinity and humanity in competition. While ancient (and not-so-ancient) Christologies from above focus on Christs divinity at the expense of his humanity, modern Christologies from below subsume his divinity into his humanity. What is needed, says Ian A. McFarland, is a Chalcedonianism without reserve, which not only affirms the humanity and divinity of Christ but also treats them as equal in theological significance. To do so, he draws on the ancient christological language that points to Christs nature, on the one hand, and his hypostasis, or personhood, on the other. And with this, McFarland begins one of the most creative and groundbreaking theological explorations into the mystery of the incarnation undertaken in recent memory.

God-Man: The Word Made Flesh is a unique book which offers an esoteric interpretation of the Holy Bible. The author explains the Bible as a parable for the human body and kundalini awakening. Throughout the book the author explains the connection between the law of nature, astrology and Christianity.

Bodies and their role in cultural discourse have been a constant focus in the humanities and social sciences in recent years, but comparatively few studies exist about Old Norse-Icelandic or early Irish literature. This study aims to redress this imbalance and presents carefully contextualised close readings of medieval texts. The chapters focus on the role of bodies in mediality discourse in various contexts: that of identity in relation to ideas about self and other, of inscribed and marked skin and of natural bodily matters such as defecation, urination and menstruation. By carefully discussing the sources in their cultural contexts, it becomes apparent that medieval Scandinavian and early Irish texts present their very own ideas about bodies and their role in structuring the narrated worlds of the texts. The study presents one of the first systematic examinations of bodies in these two literary traditions in terms of body criticism and emphasises the ingenuity and complexity of medieval texts.

What happens when persons living in the womb are declared to be legal non-persons? What is transgenderism? And why are so many countries changing the meaning of words such as Female, Husband and Mother? The Flesh Made Word makes visible the invisible thread which connects a redefinition of legal marriage to transgenderism to abortion. In doing so it shows that when the physically impossible is made legally possible the effect is that the physically possible is made legally impossible. By examining the relationships between body, mind, language and law, we can come to see that behind the curtain of language our body has been ushered off the legal stage. For legal purposes we no longer have a sex. From here on in we have only a gender.

"Few... could have predicted the delayed depth-charge of this explosive second book, motored by vividly earthly language and disguised philosophical sophistication." --Publishers Weekly, starred review "Throughout Made Flesh, one of the most powerful poetry books this year, Arnold gets at both the contradictions and timelessness of love." --Time Out New York "The readers delighted with (Arnold's) first book (Shells) will be differently enchanted with these. They contain a wealth of contemplation as well as observation and experience. Their unpunctuated free style carries the reader into the poems, piling up events and details in a breathless rush....The poems of Made Flesh are unforgettable, and it is tragic that readers will have no new books from Craig Arnold."--Magill Book Reviews A girl wakes up to find out just how completely her lover has possessed her. A couple realizes they've been trapped inside an ancient myth. A traveler glances out through a train window and catches the dim reflection of another world. This is the world of Made Flesh, the long-awaited second book by Craig Arnold, a finalist for the Utah Book Award and the High Plains book award. Made Flesh delineates a new mythology of what it means to be in the body. Marrying narrative precision to lyric ecstasy, the archaic to the avant-garde, these poems celebrate the fragility of our very selves and "the joy of self-forgetting," the acts of surrender that loves asks of us. Fierce, exuberant, and erotic, they invite the reader to share a rare and startling vision: how, if we would only permit ourselves to be drawn out of our mental privacies, out to the very surface of our skin, we might admit the beauty of being for a moment in the world, and with each other. Craig Arnold is the author of Shells, a Yale Series of Younger Poets selection chosen by W.S. Merwin. He taught at the University of Wyoming in Laramie. In late April 2009, Craig Arnold went missing on the Japanese island of Kuchinoerabu-jima, where he was working on a book about volcanoes as part of a Creative Artists' Exchange Fellowship from the Japan-United States Friendship Commission. He was forty-one years old.