- Friday, March 27, 2015
- 4:00 PM–5:15 PM
- CFAC 252
Our Academic Track features the presentation of two or three academic papers during each session.
Paper 1: Tom Waits’ Carnivalesque: “’Dysevangelion’ and the Grotesque and the Shock of Grace
Julie Hamilton
Tom Waits, a preacher of the “dysevangelion” (bad news), rhapsodizes depravity as normative, his bawdy lyrics testifying to a life from Skid Row in the form of a brawling Psalter. Utilizing Bakhtin’s theory of the “Carnivalesque” and its socio-political implications for the grotesque genre, Hamilton argues Waits’s cacophony of misfits and outsiders subverts power and authority through the medieval carnival of hyperbole, chaos and Menippean Satire. In this “world upside down” hermeneutic, Waits’s grotesque operates as a shock of grace in the darkness of his dissonant underworld, providing solidarity to the sinner while critiquing the Pharisee.
Paper 2: The Scar in the Sound: Tom Waits, Blind Willie Johnson, and the Acoustics of Incarnation
Joe Kickasola
Tom Waits is profane and sacred, a tangled knot of secular and post-secular prophecy, testifying to the the horror of religious hypocrisy, the desperate need for transcendence, and the brutality of life without it. Yet, underneath and before that, we have a voice. That sound shakes the bones and sears the viscera. The “grain” of that voice is a seemingly “excess” dimension of his work that ultimately proves key to its overall meaning. Kickasola utilizes theories of sound and embodiment, phenomenology, and theology to understand the significance of prophetic “voice,” and compares Waits with another, more directly religious, gravel-throated legend, Blind Willie Johnson.
