Embodiment and Representation in John Donne's Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions

What is it about?

Although Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions consistently demystifies the analogical permeability of the pre-modern body, it nonetheless takes the body's fluids and organs as the occasion for devotional meditation. Seeking to locate Christ's presence in and through the apparently incomprehensible structure of the body, Donne demonstrates the extent to which the humoral body retains its capacity to inscribe - or as the Neoplatonists would have it "infold" - God's ongoing presence in time. Thus although Donne registers the body's structural incomprehensibility, he nonetheless sustains language's potentially sacramental or hieratic signifying power, a power that for Donne is based upon the contiguity between the spiritual and the corporeal.

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