I’m arguing that a misconception may accompany the prominent understanding of Christ’s crucifixion: while Christian sects frequently emphasize his suffering in order to elicit an understanding or feeling of reverence for his martyrdom, the human mind is in fact, not equipped to comprehend Jesus’ torture experience.

According to Elaine Scarry in her work, The Body in Pain, the pain of torture is a sensation that is inherently linked to the collapse of its victim’s perception of the world; agony is due to dissolution of the sufferer’s sense of reality. (This torture theory piece will likely be one that I choose for our class reading.)

I’m arguing that Christ has an understanding of the world different from other humans; that he perceives the world through his Father’s eyes and is therefore exempt from the constructed, postlapsarian understanding that belongs to all other people. (There is a healthy amount of writing that claims one of the many paradisiacal aspects of Eden that Eve and Adam lose post-banishment is a perfect language: one that does not include a gap between signifiers and signifieds. In a postlapsarian state – where the members of CO310 apparently reside – we use a flawed language that does not express truth or divinity [thus the taboo of uttering God’s name in many religious circles]. When “Verbum caro factum est/the Word was made flesh” [John 1:14], he saw the world with something of a prelapsarian understanding in contrast to other people.)

I am applying this hypothesis to Elaine Scarry’s torture theory and exploring rarely discussed and (what I think to be) important questions: based on textual evidence in the bible and the crucifixion play leading up to his death, did Christ feel pain during his crucifixion? Is the human mind outfitted to empathize with Jesus?

I also hope to explore themes of the self and self-hood at work (and play) in his works, as well as the influence his biographical legend has held over modernist literature.

I am bold to say I have no comparative axis at this point. Possibly William S. Burroughs.

More specifically, I am interested in the narrative structure of each and their respective depiction(s) of women.

I will write a theoretical supplement, and possibly an essay comparing Panero with Ezra Pound.

Then, Poetics entered my life (represent!) and I did my final project on Jack Spicer, who is ridiculously interesting, sort of undiscovered in academia (with the exception, apparently, of a couple of dissertations in Ottawa), and who has poetic theories of dictation that resonate with those held by Andre Breton (Aime Cesaire's right-hand man). That could be an interesting point of comparison, especially because Breton is well known and critically acclaimed as a Surrealist, while Spicer belongs to a less respected (critically) circle of Bay Area poets and hasn't generated much criticism, although his work actually contains a surrealist aesthetic.