Art History’s Brennan explores Jewish mysticism in new book

Rice University Press publishes ‘Flowering Light’
Art History’s Brennan explores Jewish mysticism in new book

BY JESSICA STARK
Rice News staff

Color-rich images, interdisciplinary topics and experimental interpretive approaches might hinder a book’s publication with a traditional academic press, but those challenges prove no problem for Rice University Press. The innovative digital press incorporates multimedia elements to advance scholarly communication, making it an ideal fit for Marcia Brennan’s new book, “Flowering Light: Kabbalistic Mysticism and the Art of Elliot R. Wolfson.”

	MARCIA BRENNAN

The book examines Wolfson’s scholarship, poetry and painting as a single, integrated body of work. Published in March 2009, “Flowering Light” has already won a fan base and was celebrated on campus this week.

Until Brennan, associate professor of art history, no one had studied Wolfson in this way. As one of the world’s leading scholars on Jewish mysticism, Wolfson is well-known for his research on Kabbalah and for his related creative expressions in poetry. He came to Rice in 2007 to serve as the Lynette S. Autrey Visiting Professor in the Humanities Research Center, teaching a course on Jewish mysticism and researching dreams and dream interpretation in Kabbalistic thought.

Before meeting Wolfson, Brennan wasn’t aware of his paintings, but she was well aware of his scholarly contribution to the field of religious studies. Brennan co-taught a course with Jeffrey Kripal, the J. Newton Rayzor Professor in Religious Studies, who had written about Wolfson in his own scholarly work, ”Roads of Excess, Palaces of Wisdom” (University of Chicago Press, 2001). Kripal introduced her to Wolfson.

Shortly thereafter, during a trip to the Guggenheim Museum while researching another book, Brennan visited Wolfson in his New York apartment. She saw a beautiful painting on an easel and was drawn to it.

“I’ve been looking at paintings for 20 years, and this painting was most extraordinary,” Brennan said. “When you put it all together, Elliot Wolfson’s work is far more than a painting, a poem or a text. It is a complex aesthetic experience.”

After talking with Wolfson about his work over the next few days, she knew that she had the topic for another book.

“When you decide to write a book, you know you’re going to devote years of your life to it,” Brennan said. “This material was magical and beautiful. It became a part of me. So this book became about giving that experience to others so that they might see what is magical and beautiful within themselves. If you can see it in a painting, then it’s in you. I hope the contemplative exercises in my book can bring that to light for others.”

Digital press increases access

Because of the paintings’ abilities to inspire awe and contextualize the written word, Brennan wanted to make sure they could be seen by many people. A digital press increases those access opportunities exponentially. With technology developed by Rice’s Connexions program, the university press is able to publish works online, viewable for free.

But, with Rice University Press, those opportunities aren’t just digital. Through Connexions’ partnership with QOOP Inc., print copies are available on demand in both cloth and paper bindings. Both online and in print, the book contains 23 color reproductions of paintings by Wolfson. 

“The concurrent appearance of books in such multiple — electronic and paper — formats promises to contribute in new ways to an expanded sense of what it means to work with living texts,” Brennan said. “Indeed, a digital press seems to present an ideal forum for potentially transgressive ideas, edgy new expressions of the art and ‘thought that is happening now.'”

It wasn’t just any digital press that could have made her book what it is, Brennan said. The Rice University Press was best-suited for the job in part because of the leadership there.

“We are so fortunate to have Fred Moody as editor-in-chief of Rice University Press,” Brennan said. “His expertise is only matched by his generosity. His guidance and tireless efforts made the book better and better.”

Rave reviews

“Flowering Light” has already received rave reviews and is available at http://cnx.org/content/col10611/latest/.

“This text in many ways creates a new paradigm for art history and art criticism,” said Jay Clarke, curator of prints and drawings at the Art Institute of Chicago.

“Marcia Brennan’s training and expertise in the history of modern art gives her a very specific and very apt position from which to view the reflections and refractions of the scholarship, the poetry and the paintings of Elliot Wolfson,” Kripal said. “The Cartesian subject, and with it the search for pure objectivity, is abandoned here for a much richer, and much more mysterious, postmodern self and accompanying epistemology that come to be (and to not be) through elaborate processes of mirroring, reflection and refraction — in effect, a mystical language of dancing, flowering Light.”

For more information about Rice University Press, visit http://ricepress.rice.edu/. To submit book proposals or to discuss editorial matters, contact Moody at 206-855-0933 or fred.moody@rice.edu.