Third International Conference

Consciousness, Theatre, Literature and the Arts

May 16-18, 2009, Lincoln, UK

Plenary Session

David Garrett Izzo

Readings from Mystical fiction

Art is a vehicle for transcendence. Human beings have a mostly unconscious, but sometimes conscious, great yearning for some form of transcendence that unites rather than separates and gives meaning to what otherwise seems a chaos of fragmentary and insurmountable division. Art is one form of achieving a temporary, if fleeting, transcendence because art is always a supernatural and mystical representation, but never a duplication, of physical reality. This awesome feeling of transcendence momentarily evokes awe-sociations with the better parts of the individual self that wishes to connect, even if subliminally, with other audiences and readers in a unifying commiseration that signifies that one is not alone. In his novels, A Change of Heart and Maximus in Catland, David Garrett Izzo incorporates his scholarly work on Mysticism as a Literary Theory into fictional parables for young and old. Izzo will be discussing this theory in a separate parallel session.

David Garrett Izzo is a professor and Director of English and Humanities for American Public University. He has published 14 books and 60 essays about literature and philosophy, as well as three novels and two plays.  His forthcoming book, The Influence of Mysticism on 20th Century British and American Literature, is a summation of over 20 years of study on this subject.