Biblical Parables and Their Modern Re-creations

Biblical Parables and Their Modern Re-creations PDF Author: Gila Safran Naveh
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 143841434X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 315

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Book Description
In Biblical Parables and Their Modern Re-creations, Gila Safran Naveh carefully charts the historical transformation of these deceptively simple narratives to reveal fundamental shifts in their form, function, and most significantly, their readers' cognitive processes. Bringing together for the first time parables from the Scriptures, the synoptic Gospels, Chassidic tales, and medieval philosophy with the mashal, the rabbinic parables commonly used to interpret Scripture, this book brilliantly contrasts the rhetorical strategies of ancient parables with more recent examples of the genre by Kafka, Borges, Calvino, and Agnon. By using an interdisciplinary approach and insights from current semiotic, linguistic, psychoanalytic, and gender theories, Naveh reveals a dramatic social, cultural, and political shift in the way we view the divine.

Biblical Parables and Their Modern Re-creations

Biblical Parables and Their Modern Re-creations PDF Author: Gila Safran Naveh
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 143841434X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 315

Get Book

Book Description
In Biblical Parables and Their Modern Re-creations, Gila Safran Naveh carefully charts the historical transformation of these deceptively simple narratives to reveal fundamental shifts in their form, function, and most significantly, their readers' cognitive processes. Bringing together for the first time parables from the Scriptures, the synoptic Gospels, Chassidic tales, and medieval philosophy with the mashal, the rabbinic parables commonly used to interpret Scripture, this book brilliantly contrasts the rhetorical strategies of ancient parables with more recent examples of the genre by Kafka, Borges, Calvino, and Agnon. By using an interdisciplinary approach and insights from current semiotic, linguistic, psychoanalytic, and gender theories, Naveh reveals a dramatic social, cultural, and political shift in the way we view the divine.

Reframing Politics in the Hebrew Bible

Reframing Politics in the Hebrew Bible PDF Author: Mira Morgenstern
Publisher: Hackett Publishing
ISBN: 1624664636
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 436

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Book Description
Inspired by the Enlightenment readings of Hebrew biblical texts generated in the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries, Mira Morgenstern's Reframing Politics in the Hebrew Bible goes beyond the pioneering interpretations of various biblical texts penned by such noted Bible students as Spinoza, Rousseau, and Angelina Grimké to present an introduction to the Hebrew Bible as a whole from the perspective of a modern-day political theorist. In doing so, it offers a brilliant thematic guide to the Hebrew Bible's most politically salient passages, complete with text and commentary. Morgenstern's account of the significance of these ancient yet strangely modern texts will fascinate students of both ancient and modern political theory—as well as all readers of the Hebrew Bible itself.

Ḥiddushim

Ḥiddushim PDF Author: Michael Fishbane
Publisher: Academic Studies PRess
ISBN: 1644698587
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 387

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Book Description
A Centennial, writes Hebrew College President Rabbi Sharon Cohen Anisfeld, “is an invitation to reflect on the last century of teaching and learning at Hebrew College, to ask ourselves what has changed and what has endured, to explore accomplishments and share ongoing struggles, to articulate our aspirations for the next one hundred years.” A compilation of captivating essays on Jewish studies alongside powerful personal memoirs from the College’s earliest years until today, Ḥiddushim captures and celebrates the spirit of a learning community connected to its source and brimming with spiritual and intellectual creativity as it carries forward its legacy of rootedness and renewal into the future.

A Poet's High Argument

A Poet's High Argument PDF Author: Laurel Snow Corelle
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN: 9781570037627
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 160

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Book Description
"In this original study of Elizabeth Bishop's lifelong engagement with Christianity, Laurel Snow Corelle illuminates the ways in which Bishop's Protestant childhood and reading of Christian literature, coupled with her deep commitment to agnosticism, inform the works of this former poet laureate of the United States. Corelle sees in Bishop's writing a sophisticated and sustained interrogation of orthodoxy that exquisitely balances Bishop's religious upbringing with her agnostic stance and that has until now escaped thorough examination." "To make her case, Corelle immerses the reader in Bishop's works and world in order to convey the rigor, subtlety, and complexity of the poet's dialogue with historical Christianity and its literature. At the heart of that engagement are some compelling peculiarities. Bishop was a self-proclaimed nonbeliever; yet she grew up in two devout Protestant homes, and she studied Christian literature throughout her life. As a result some of the perspectives and prejudices voiced in her verse are transparently Protestant." "This study illustrates how she incorporated allusions to scripture and Protestant sacraments in a subversive critique of organized Christianity and how her appropriation of three traditional genres common to Christian literature - allegory, pastoral elegy, and spiritual autobiography - advanced her own poetic purposes."--BOOK JACKET.

Conceiving a Nation

Conceiving a Nation PDF Author: Mira Morgenstern
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271036532
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
Current conflicts in both national and international arenas have undermined the natural, organic concept of nationhood as conventionally espoused in the nineteenth century. Conceiving a Nation argues that the modern understanding of the nation as a contested concept—as the product of a fluid and ongoing process of negotiation open to a range of livable solutions—is actually rooted in the Bible. This book draws attention to the contribution that the Bible makes to political discourse about the nation. The Bible is particularly well suited to this open-ended discourse because of its own nature as a text whose ambiguity and laconic quality render it constantly open to new interpretations and applicable to changing circumstances. The Bible offers a pluralistic understanding of different models of political development for different nations, and it depicts altering concepts of national identity over time. In this book, Morgenstern reads the Bible as the source of a dynamic critique of the ideas that are conventionally considered to be fundamental to national identity, treating in successive chapters the ethnic (Ruth), the cultural (Samson), the political (Jotham), and the territorial (Esther). Throughout, she explores a number of common themes, such as the relationship of women to political authority and the “strangeness” of Israelite political existence. In the Conclusion, she elucidates how biblical analysis can aid in recognition of modern claims to nationhood.

The Routledge Handbook of Fiction and Belief

The Routledge Handbook of Fiction and Belief PDF Author: Alison James
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000993361
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 815

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Book Description
The Routledge Handbook of Fiction and Belief offers a fresh reevaluation of the relationship between fiction and belief, surveying key debates and perspectives from a range of disciplines including narrative and cultural studies, science, religion, and politics. This volume draws on global, cutting edge research and theory to investigate the historically variable understandings of fictionality, and allows readers to grasp the role of fictions in our understanding of the world. This interdisciplinary approach provides a thorough introduction to the fundamental themes of: Theoretical and Philosophical Perspectives on Fiction Fiction, Fact, and Science Social Effects and Uses of Fiction Fiction and Politics Fiction and Religion Questioning how fictions in fact shape, mediate or distort our beliefs about the real world, essays in this volume outline the state of theoretical debates from the perspectives of literary theory, philosophy, sociology, religious studies, history, and the cognitive sciences. It aims to take stock of the real or supposed effects that fiction has on the world, and to offer a wide-reaching reflection on the implications of belief in fictions in the so-called “post-truth” era.

Borges, Buddhism and World Literature

Borges, Buddhism and World Literature PDF Author: Dominique Jullien
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3030047172
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 126

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Book Description
This book follows the renunciation story in Borges and beyond, arguing for its centrality as a Borgesian compositional trope and as a Borgesian prism for reading a global constellation of texts. The renunciation story at the heart of Buddhism, that of a king who leaves his palace to become an ascetic, fascinated Borges because of its cross-cultural adaptability and metamorphic nature, and because it resonated so powerfully across philosophy, politics and aesthetics. From the story and its many variants, Borges’s essays formulated a 'morphological' conception of literature (borrowing the idea from Goethe), whereby a potentially infinite number of stories were generated by transformation of a finite number of 'archetypes'. The king-and-ascetic encounter also tells a powerful political story, setting up a confrontation between power and authority; Borges’s own political predicament is explored against the rich background of truth-telling renouncers. In its poetic variant, the renunciation archetype morphs into stories about art and artists, with renunciation a key requirement of the creative process: the discussion weaves in and out of Borges to highlight modern writers’ debt to asceticism. Ultimately, the enigmatic appeal of the renunciation story aligns it with the open-endedness of modern parables.

Black on Earth

Black on Earth PDF Author: Kimberly N. Ruffin
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 082033720X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 231

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Book Description
American environmental literature has relied heavily on the perspectives of European Americans, often ignoring other groups. In Black on Earth, Kimberly Ruffin expands the reach of ecocriticism by analyzing the ecological experiences, conceptions, and desires seen in African American writing. Ruffin identifies a theory of “ecological burden and beauty” in which African American authors underscore the ecological burdens of living within human hierarchies in the social order just as they explore the ecological beauty of being a part of the natural order. Blacks were ecological agents before the emergence of American nature writing, argues Ruffin, and their perspectives are critical to understanding the full scope of ecological thought. Ruffin examines African American ecological insights from the antebellum era to the twenty-first century, considering WPA slave narratives, neo–slave poetry, novels, essays, and documentary films, by such artists as Octavia Butler, Alice Walker, Henry Dumas, Percival Everett, Spike Lee, and Jayne Cortez. Identifying themes of work, slavery, religion, mythology, music, and citizenship, Black on Earth highlights the ways in which African American writers are visionary ecological artists.

Scheherazade's Children

Scheherazade's Children PDF Author: Philip F. Kennedy
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479857092
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 468

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Book Description
Scheherazade’s Children gathers together leading scholars to explore the reverberations of the tales of the Arabian Nights across a startlingly wide and transnational range of cultural endeavors. The contributors, drawn from a wide array of disciplines, extend their inquiries into the book’s metamorphoses on stage and screen as well as in literature—from India to Japan, from Sanskrit mythology to British pantomime, from Baroque opera to puppet shows. Their highly original research illuminates little-known manifestations of the Nights, and provides unexpected contexts for understanding the book’s complex history. Polemical issues are thereby given unprecedented and enlightening interpretations. Organized under the rubrics of Translating, Engaging, and Staging, these essays view the Nights corpus as a uniquely accretive cultural bundle that absorbs the works upon which it has exerted influence. In this view, the Arabian Nights is a dynamic, living and breathing cross-cultural phenomenon that has left its mark on fields as disparate as the European novel and early Indian cinema. While scholarly, the writers’ approach is also lively and entertaining, and the book is richly illustrated with unusual materials to deliver a sparkling and highly original exploration of the Arabian Nights’ radiating influence on world literature, performance, and culture.

Kafka's Jewish Languages

Kafka's Jewish Languages PDF Author: David Suchoff
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812205243
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
After Franz Kafka died in 1924, his novels and short stories were published in ways that downplayed both their author's roots in Prague and his engagement with Jewish tradition and language, so as to secure their place in the German literary canon. Now, nearly a century after Kafka began to create his fictions, Germany, Israel, and the Czech Republic lay claim to his legacy. Kafka's Jewish Languages brings Kafka's stature as a specifically Jewish writer into focus. David Suchoff explores the Yiddish and modern Hebrew that inspired Kafka's vision of tradition. Citing the Jewish sources crucial to the development of Kafka's style, the book demonstrates the intimate relationship between the author's Jewish modes of expression and the larger literary significance of his works. Suchoff shows how "The Judgment" evokes Yiddish as a language of comic curse and examines how Yiddish, African American, and culturally Zionist voices appear in the unfinished novel, Amerika. In his reading of The Trial, Suchoff highlights the black humor Kafka learned from the Yiddish theater, and he interprets The Castle in light of Kafka's involvement with the renewal of the Hebrew language. Finally, he uncovers the Yiddish and Hebrew meanings behind Kafka's "Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse-Folk" and considers the recent legal case in Tel Aviv over the possession of Kafka's missing manuscripts as a parable of the transnational meanings of his writing.