Clothes mocketh the man: Kierkegaard, the Bible, and the aesthetics of attire
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Abstract
- As humans are the only animals that clothe themselves artificially,
clothing has been the object of much religious and moral reflection in different
cultures around the world. Textile analogies and clothing metaphors crop up
frequently throughout Kierkegaard’s authorship, both the signed and
the pseudonymous writings, sometimes as image, other times as metaphor or
analogy. However, this article confines itself to considering the motifs
of clothes and nakedness very specifically in Kierkegaard’s Upbuilding
Discourses in Various Spirits. The evocation of the single individual in
the book’s front matter already hints at a biblically-rooted, clothes-related
image that recurs in the volume: Adamic nakedness, or the primordial, preclothed
human being. As the present article demonstrates, this image connects
with a complex semantics of clothing that runs through the discourses,
entailing three other main images from the Bible: King Solomon in his purple
robes, the even more splendidly clothed lilies of the fields, and the practically
naked crucified Jesus — with the additional biblical figures of Job and the
victim from the Good Samaritan story becoming pertinent as well.
| Title | Clothes mocketh the man: Kierkegaard, the Bible, and the aesthetics of attire |
|---|---|
| Creator | Ziolkowski, Eric Jozef |
| Publisher | Researcher. European Journal of Humanities & Social Sciences |
| Academic Department | Religious Studies |
| Division | Humanities |
| Organization | Lafayette College |
| Date Issued | 2019 |
| Date Available | 2019-04-30T14:16:21Z |
| Type | Article |
| Language | English |
| Keyword | clothes |
| Job (biblical character) | |
| Kierkegaard | |
| King Solomon | |
| Jesus | |
| Bible | |
| Bibliographic Citation | Ziolkowski, E. J. (2019) "Clothes mocketh the man: Kierkegaard, the Bible, and the aesthetics of attire." Researcher. European Journal of Humanities & Social Sciences 2 (2): 87–112. |
| Standard Identifier | DOI 10.32777/r.2019.2.2.6 |
| Handle 10385/2855 | |
| Permalink | http://hdl.handle.net/10385/2855 |
| Rights Statement |
In Copyright
|
| Rights Holders | Ziolkowski, Eric Jozef |
Contains
| File | Ziolkowski-Researcher-vol2-2019.pdf | Uploaded 2019-10-20 | Public | Download |
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