Blinking Icons: Letters to Saint Augustine
Document Type
Master's Thesis
Graduation Year
2024
Writing Track
Fiction
Degree
Master of Fine Arts
Program
Creative Writing
Program Director
Judy Halebsky, PhD
First Reader
Thomas Burke, MA
Second Reader
Judy Halebsky, PhD
Description
Blinking Icons:Letters to Saint Augustine is a hybrid contemporary epistolary historical novel in conversation with Saint Augustine’s Confessions. Sarah Ruden’s translation inspires an exploration of interiority, states of consciousness, memory, voice, and more broadly, the parallel socio-political and spiritual realities of contemporary America and the late Roman Empire.
Central to Augustine’s legacy is the Cartesian mind/body split’, explored from the perspective of a contemporary menopausal woman suffering mysterious pain. Alternate fictional narratives of Augustine’s mother and his partner explore universal female experiences of trauma, servitude, ancestral memory, dreams, motherhood, and faith.
The climacteric (menopause) is considered in relation to the ravages of climate change.
Gender and Intertextuality as theme: the narrator is in dialogue with female philosophers and writers whose work specifically and/or thematically addresses Augustine: Woolf, Mantel, Arendt, Toews, West, and Tokarczuk, among others. In counterpoint, dialogue with male writers, including Borges, Salter, Beckett, Freud, Foucault, Jung, Yeats, and Job, enables confrontation with the anxiety of male influence on female consciousness, thought, and experience.
Kairos and Chronos, screwball comedy and tragedy, elective affinities, fate and personal agency, astrology, history of belief and the Soul, Catholicism, electricity, fateful names, wordplay, translation, and language’s ability to inspire, connect, transport, liberate, and divide culture are all at play.
In letters to Augustine, the narrator projects on him various roles: lover, confidant, confessor, muse, judge, scapegoat. To paraphrase Foucault, she uses Augustine to think with, in order to untwist the patriarchal legacy of Catholic misogyny from spiritual matters in the Confessions. The narrator's intellectual and spiritual crisis is to identify and reach detente with Saint Augustine’s broad legacy in Western literature, psychoanalytic theory, theology, philosophy, and political thought, in order to liberate her artistic voice and regain agency.