Date/Time
Date(s) - 10/30/2025
3:00 pm - 4:30 pm
Location
4010 JFSB
Category(ies)
Our Faith & Imagination Lecture will be given by Steven Knepper, Virginia Military Institute, on Thursday, October 30 at 3:00 PM in 4010 JFSB. This lecture will examine how literary epiphanies reveal transcendent mystery and deepen our sense of the unknown. We hope you will join us.
Refreshments will be served.
Title: Epiphanic Excess in Life and Literature
Though “epiphany” did not become a term-of-art in literary criticism until its use by James Joyce, epiphanic disclosures are as old as literature (and life) itself. Most critics emphasize that literary epiphanies involve new insight or revelatory knowledge. Perhaps even more important, however, is how the epiphany awakens or renews a sense of what is not known. Epiphanies suggest mysterious depths. They intimate a “more” in excess of any understanding. They have a transcendent dimension. While often central to the works in which they appear, literary epiphanies also have the potential to awaken the reader to depths in others and the world beyond the page.
This lecture develops a fuller sense of literary epiphany first by following Joyce’s intuition into theophanies such as the Epiphany in the Bible. Second, it develops this sense of epiphany by invoking the contemporary philosopher William Desmond’s concept of “overdeterminacy” and the contemporary sociologist Hartmut Rosa’s notion of “uncontrollability.” Both thinkers help us consider how literary language is particularly apt for evoking epiphanic disclosures and how literary epiphanies may in turn give us new eyes for seeing a transcendent dimension in the wider world. Joyce’s short story “The Dead” provides this lecture with its paradigmatic literary exemplar.
About our guest:
Steven Knepper is Bruce C. Gottwald, Jr. ’81 Chair for Academic Excellence at Virginia Military Institute, where he teaches in the Department of English, Rhetoric, and Humanistic Studies. He is concerned with the intersection of literature, philosophy, and religion. He is the author of Wonder Strikes: Approaching Aesthetics and Literature with William Desmond (SUNY, 2022) and the co-author of Byung-Chul Han: A Critical Introduction (Polity, 2024). He has edited A Heart of Flesh: William Desmond and the Bible (Cascade, 2023) and the forthcoming The Intimate Strangeness of Poetry: William Desmond and Literature. A widely published poet, Knepper is also the founding editor of New Verse Review: A Journal of Lyric and Narrative Poetry.
