The resonance of seen things: Seeing the Virgin Mary in the concrete

Abstract What follows is an exploration of an experience of seeing. The experience of interest here is the seeing of Our Lady of the Underpass, a Marian apparition that was seen in an underpass in Chicago in early 2005. Taking the images and objects brought to the make‐shift shrine as clues, we explore the constitutive poetic resonances ingredient to this seeing. We point to how these constitutive poetic resonances function both as an explanation of and as instructions for the seeing of the Virgin Mary in the underpass. We then consider how the semiotic multimodality of these poetic resonances made this seeing so robust, paying particular attention to the historical dimension of seeing. The resulting analysis offers the outlines of a cultural historical onto‐poetic approach that builds and expands upon existing physiological approaches to seeing by highlighting the essential role of social, cultural, and historical contexts for seeing.