UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, IRVINE After Tragedy: The Romance of the Lowly God DISSERTATION submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in English by David Michael Woods Dissertation Committee: Professor Victoria A. Silver, Chair Professor Julia Reinhard Lupton Associate Professor Elizabeth A. Allen Professor Jane O. Newman 2018 © 2018 David Michael Woods DEDICATION To my Lisa, my John, and my Violet Because the greatest thing in this wonderful life is coming home to you. Golden years are passing by, These happy, golden years. —Laura Ingalls Wilder, These Happy, Golden Years In solitude What happiness, who can enjoy alone, Or all enjoying, what contentment find? —John Milton, Paradise Lost Why art thou proud, O man? God, for thee, became low. Thou woudst perhaps be ashamed to imitate a lowly man; then at least imitate the lowly God. —St. Augustine, Confessions Go, litel bok, go, litel myn tragedye, Ther God thi makere yet, er that he dye, So sende myght to make in som comedye! —Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS iv CURRICULUM VITAE vi ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION viii INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER 1: After Tragedy: 10 The Romance of the Lowly God CHAPTER 2: Sacrificing Death: The Tragedy of the Heroic Dream in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight 83 CHAPTER 3: Redeeming Love: 148 Eros and the Dilemma of Magic in Book III of the Faerie Queene CHAPTER 4: Seeing God: 213 Homecoming in Paradise Lost BIBLIOGRAPHY 275 iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to express the deepest gratitude to my committee chair and dear friend, Victoria Silver. I have seen a packed room of professors buzz with self-forgetful anticipation, heard one senior academic whisper to another, “It’s like waiting for a rock star,” before you entered a room once to read a paper. You entered and apologized, oblivious to their regard and embarrassed to have kept them waiting: “My printer, Dears, she hates me.” Thank you for being unusual. Thank you for being humble and generous as a person, but unyielding and unapologetic in your work. I have seen students turn to you as to a mother, and I have seen seasoned scholars unravel at your critique. You have eviscerated my bad arguments and helped me write better ones. You have modeled a form of academia that doesn’t indulge in self-promotion but is quietly dedicated to the hard work of making the better argument. For the better part of the last twenty years (is it possible?), and with precious little justification, you have encouraged and supported me in everything I’ve done. Through years and years of good conversation and loud, long laughter, you have helped me steer a course between the Scylla and Charybdis of vanity and self-loathing peculiar to academic life, and you have always pointed me homeward, to the gifts of time, place, and people the Lord has given me. Just before John was born, you said to me, “Oh, Sweetheart, with a child in your life, every day is Christmas.” I couldn’t have known how right you were. You are my great friend and guide. I only wish the whole world knew and read you. To Julia, you are wheels within wheels, smiles within smiles, the Wonderful Wizard of Oz without the curtain, the smoke, or the machine. We all know you basically run the humanities department, maybe the entire university. Thank God for that. You have been unflaggingly supportive of myself and everyone who has ever passed through our department. From all of us, thank you. To Elizabeth, poet and mentor, thank you for modeling the craftsmanship and hard work of deep scholarship and meaningful pedagogy. Thank you for not being faddish. Thank you for being patient and stubborn and kind. Thank you for treating the work we do seriously and carefully. It is all craft, and you are the guild-master. To Jane, my first professor, you spotted a teenager of very modest intelligence in his first class at UCI and wrote him an email to encourage his engagement with the material and offer help along the way. I have never forgotten that. You treated me seriously as a person and as a thinker when I had done nothing to earn it except be a student for one week in one of your classes. What uncommon grace. It motivated me in ways that would be difficult to enumerate. Thank you for combining brilliance and rigor with true excitement. Everything is alive and consequential in a Jane Newman seminar. The gratitude I owe my parents is enormous. Mom, you have been the most pivotal teacher in my life. You shaped my mind and heart and taught me to love what is good. Thank you for all the stories you read to me and the books you gave me when I was young. And thank you for all the love and all the disagreements, and all the love on the other side of all the disagreements, now that I am older. Dad, your support has been one of the surest things in my life since I left home almost two decades ago. Your hard work, humility, and steadfast faith are the very things I hope my children see in me someday. Thank you both for praying and praying and praying. It has made all the difference. iv To the little church, my great big beautiful, struggling, celebrating, sobbing, singing, persevering, learning, breaking, changing, growing, laughing, healing family: if only you knew what you have meant to me these many years. Thank you for your patience while I did this and so often had my time divided. May we finish the race together. Finally, to my Lisa: what words can there be for the love we share? For the support and strength you’ve been to me? Thank you for walking through those hills with me, for talking with me late into the night, night after night, until things eventually got clearer and clearer. Thank you for letting me sail off every morning to play this little game of books and words and ideas, and for letting me sail back again each evening to laugh and feast and dream. You are my best friend. What a joy it has been to discover that all this time we were already home. Lovely Lisa by the sea. And now these little ones. It’s a wonderful life. Soli Deo Gloria. v CURRICULUM VITAE David Michael Woods Education 2018 Ph.D. in English, University of California, Irvine 2011 M.A. in English, University of California, Irvine 2010 M.A. in Theology, with honors, Fuller Theological Seminary 2006 M.A. in Writing, first class honors, National University of Ireland, Galway 2005 B.A. in English, magna cum laude, University of California, Irvine Fields of Specialization Early Modern Literature, History of Literary Theory, Religious Studies, Medieval Literature, History and Theory of Tragedy, History and Theory of Rhetoric, Classical and Scriptural Genealogies of Western Literature, Postsecularism, War and Violence Publications Article Currently Under Review: Religion & Literature (Revisions Requested) “Damaged Life: Reading the Parable of the Medieval Pearl” Conference Presentations “Blood, Sex, Magic: The Erotic Structure of Ordinary Life in Book Three of the Faerie Queene,” Renaissance Society of America, New Orleans, 2018 “Coming Home: Violence, Narrative, and Nostos, from Troy to Afghanistan” Documenting War Symposium, University of California, Irvine, 2017 “Uncovering Our Losses: Divestiture, Revelation, and the Theology of King Lear” Early Cultures Conference, University of California, Irvine, 2013 “Sacrificing Death: The Economy of Flesh in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” Religion and Literature Conference, University of California, Irvine, 2012 vi Awards Andrew W. Mellon-Sawyer Seminar Pre-Doctoral Fellowship, “Documenting War,” 2016-2017 Dorothy and Donald Strauss Dissertation Year Fellowship, UC Irvine, 2015-2016 Ray S. Anderson Memorial Scholarship, Fuller Theological Society, 2009-2010 Rotary Ambassadorial Scholarship, 2005-2006 Humanities Honors, University of California, Irvine, 2005 Honorable Mention, Outstanding Humanities Honors Thesis, UC Irvine, 2005 SURP Writing Fellowship, University of California, Irvine, 2004 Stanley Behrens Scholarship, University of California, Irvine, 2003-2005 Teaching Experience Department of English, University of California, Irvine (2011-2018) E28B: Tragic and Comic Drama E28C: Realism and Romance Teaching Assistant Department of English, University of California, Irvine E100: History of Literary Theory Department of Religious Studies, University of California, Irvine Religion 5A: Abrahamic Faiths Composition Instructor Department of English, University of California, Irvine WR 39B: Rhetoric and Composition WR 39C: Argument and Research Department of English, Saddleback College English 1A: The Principles of Composition English 1B: Argument and Research vii ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION After Tragedy: The Romance of the Lowly God by David Michael Woods Doctor of Philosophy in English University of California, Irvine, 2018 Professor Victoria A. Silver, Chair In this dissertation, I argue that romance, as a conceptual mode, refuses the inexorability and the finality of the tragic by uniquely admitting the force of the sacred without banishing the secular or erasing the phenomenal world. By refusing to give tragedy the last word, romance rejects the antinomianism at the heart of both agonistic and liberationist secularization theses of the late modern West. It has been usual, however, to look at romance from the vantage of the classical, Graeco-Roman tradition, seeing in it not a radical mode that supersedes the tragic and subverts the ideal, but a conservative mode that idealizes the aristocratic class, justifies the status quo, and correlates the beautiful with the good. I argue there is a second, often overlooked genealogy of romance, whose basic grammar parallels that of classical romance yet inverts many of its central assumptions.