The Sacramental Text Reconsidered

Abstract

As an Afterword to the Special Issue on “The Sacramental Text Reconsidered,” this essay consolidates approaches to sacramentality in literary studies in four dimensions, and these dimensions are symptomatic of the wider sub-field and the larger context of literary studies at present. Those four ways are: the sacrament as a historical trajectory; the sacrament as concept, and also the vehicle of conceptual amnesia; the sacrament as language; the sacrament as literature.