Two senior English majors gave the Vade Mecum Honors Lectures for the English department Feb. 14.
The department selected seniors Gregory Whalen and Anna Baldwin to deliver the lectures. The presentation is part of an annual tradition honoring senior English majors whose capstone essays best express insight and excellence, Assistant Professor of English Patrick Timmis said in an email to the department before the event.
Whalen’s lecture, titled “‘Of the Comfort of the Resurrection’: Hopkins’ Redemption of the Heraclitean Fire,” discussed the Gerard Manley Hopkins poem “That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection.”
“There is something about the Heraclitean fire that disturbs the poet so deeply, presumably because it rings true in his experience,” Whalen said during the lecture. “If it was just a thought experiment, he wouldn’t feel threatened by this. It disturbs him so much that he turns immediately to the single most radically transformative event in cosmic history for comfort.”
Whalen said because of the resurrection, Hopkins comes to see Heraclitean fire not as violent consumption but as redemptive transformation.
“Rather than denying it, he is forcing a reconciliation with that Heraclitean fire,” Whalen said. “That there is the immortal diamond, and that there’s going to be a change through which it goes, and yet that fire at the end, through the resurrection, is a renewing fire that makes it truly immortal for all eternity.”
Baldwin’s lecture, titled “‘A More Tolerable Image’: Flannery O’Connor’s ‘The Partridge Festival,’” reflected on a Flannery O’Connor short story. In the story, the character Calhoun only comes to see the good in his neighbor and see himself for who he is after encountering the madman Singleton.
“Flannery O’Connor once described the main action in her stories as an action where the devil is the unwilling instrument of grace,” Baldwin said. “It is possible that Singleton may play a role like that. In encountering him, Calhoun experiences the grace of seeing another and seeing himself.”
Baldwin compared Calhoun seeing himself for the first time with Flannery O’Connor’s self-portrait and the Byzantine icon Christ Pantocrator.
“O’Connor paints herself with this symbol of humility while still painting herself in Christ’s image, perhaps to say that it is at her most humble that she most resembles Christ,” Baldwin said. “In a similar way, when Calhoun is most humble and most self-forgetful, he is most himself and most like his grandfather — in this sense the Christ reflection in miniature.”
According to Timmis’ email, Whalen and Baldwin’s lectures were the students’ response to the Associate Professor of English Dwight Lindley’s Opening Charge in the fall.
“I talked about how literary texts are analogous to people,” Lindley said. “The way we relate to them is similar to the way we relate to other people. Good books are kind of like friends. They have a dignity that other people have.”
Lindley said both the Opening Charge and the Senior Vade Mecum lectures served to excite the department faculty and English majors for studying literature.
“The books themselves could be the companions to a good life,” Lindley said. “You become who your friends are. Your friends rub off on you and form you. I think it’s really true with books and entertainment more broadly. The kind of stuff that you take in becomes who you are.”
