Browsing by Author "Lambert, Christina J., 1994-"

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A holy stream and a strange marriage : environmental and sacramental healing in Wendell Berry's Jayber Crow.
(2019-04-11) Lambert, Christina J., 1994-; Daniel, Julia E.
Wendell Berry’s novel, Jayber Crow, dramatizes both ecological and theological realities, and is invested in the fields of blue-ecocriticism, environmental humanities, ecofeminism, and ecotheology. I consider the images of water and marriage in Jayber Crow in light of these theoretical fields in order to draw attention to the entwined acts of rehabilitating the sacramental and the environmental imaginations that Berry presents in this novel. The first chapter of this project describes how the river that runs through Jayber’s life physically and spiritually shapes him, dramatizing what it means for water to have an environmental and sacramental presence in our everyday lives. The second chapter considers Jayber’s “strange marriage” to Mattie Chatham and how it models a redemption of the objectifying gaze in order to restore the covenantal significance of both human and nonhuman relationships through an education of the imagination.
Tea, gammon, and coke : the eucharistic imaginary of T.S. Eliot and Denise Levertov.
(2023-08) Lambert, Christina J., 1994-; Daniel, Julia E.
In this project, I read for food and drink imagery across T. S. Eliot and Denise Levertov’s bodies of work, and by collecting each cup of tea, meal of bloody flesh, mouthful of Cherries Jubilee, and bite of honeycomb, I illustrate the eucharistic imaginary of these poets. This project exists at the nexus of food studies, eucharistic theology, theology of food, and twentieth-century poetry and verse drama to illustrate the cultural, material, and spiritual significance of acts of eating with Eliot and Levertov’s oeuvres. Critical work in food studies, particularly as it relates to modernism and the twentieth century, often neglects the theological dimensions of eating. My research intervenes by illustrating how these authors present food as a distinctive aspect of material culture in which the secular and the sacred, the everyday and the transcendent, come together in unique ways to expand the scope of food studies. This project argues for the importance of Eliot as an influence on Levertov and following the food and drink across their extended bodies of work establishes this link. This pairing of authors tells a story about the transformation of Western food in the first and second half of the twentieth century. In light of their investments in organicism and ecology, Eliot and Levertov both respond in verse to the mechanization of eating and eaters with the language and liturgy of their sacramental faith traditions. From Eliot’s Waste Land to his Four Quartets, Levertov’s Vietnam war poetry to her religious lyrics, acts of ritualized and eucharistic eating allow these poets to engage with everyday acts of consumption as signs of injustice or sites of redemption. Along with their major poetic works, I also bring to the fore their performed verse, illustrating the eucharistic structure of their dramatizations of martyrdom.