William Franke
Associate Professor of Comparative Literature

William Franke trained in philosophy and theology at Williams College and Oxford University, and in comparative literature at Berkeley and Stanford (Ph.D. 1991). He is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Italian, as well as of Religious Studies, at Vanderbilt University, where he coordinates the graduate program in philosophy and literature. He has published philosophical and theological interpretations of poets, including Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Blake, Yeats, Leopardi, Manzoni, Montale, Racine, Baudelaire, Jabès, Celan, and Stevens. He has also published theoretical essays in hermeneutics and dialectics, treating such subjects as figurative rhetoric, dialectical and deconstructive logic, negative theology, and psychoanalysis as a hermeneutics of subjectivity.

His books include Dante’s Interpretive Journey, published in 1996 in the Religion and Postmodernism series of the University of Chicago Press. It elaborates an existential theory of interpretation that critiques modern hermeneutic theories, particularly those of Heidegger and Gadamer, on the basis of the medieval theological vision of the Divine Comedy. His On What Cannot Be Said (Notre Dame University Press, 2007) proposes a synoptic view of the Western tradition of apophatic discourse from Plato to postmodernism. His forthcoming Poetry and Apocalypse (Stanford University Press, 2008) offers a theological reading of poetic language in the Christian epic tradition from the Bible and Dante to James Joyce. It also elaborates a critical negative theology of poetic language.

He has been visiting associate professor of comparative literature at the University of Hong Kong (Fall 2005) and Fulbright Distinguished Chair for Intercultural Theology and Study of Religion at the University of Salzburg (Spring 2007). He has received international fellowships from the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung (1994-95), the Camargo Foundation (Fall 1999), and the Bogliasco Foundation (Fellow in Philosophy, Spring 2006).

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