Exodus and redemption in Toni Morrison’s Paradise: a magical encounter with the Bible
Focusing on writers who approach the Bible as a source that is both instructive and dangerous,Subverting Scriptures seeks to provide an academic analysis of cultural biblical saturation at a time when measured voices are necessary to counterbalance politically motivated religious rhetoric. Using as its point of departure the current political landscape – where the Bible is drawn on freely and unabashedly without critical reflection to legitimate and justify all manner of agendas – the contributors in this collection engage the Bible in new, imaginative, and critical ways, in the hopes of creating a new space for dialogue.
Slayers of Moses, The: The Emergence of Rabbinic Interpretation in Modern Literary Theory
The leopards the rebellious, profaning, heretical forces have become part of the holy ritual itself, through interpretation. Displacement not only describes such extreme misreading, is not only a technique of interpretation; it is the only way to survive the endless displacements of Jewish history. Displacement is a necessary re-vision and re-creation of a text which is the only anchor of a people displaced in space. Displacement, in other words, is both the condition of and answer to exile. The leopards become part of the ritual. In the school of heretic hermeneutics, holy and profane intermingle; there is something sacred about writing, commentary, and texts, yet these notions are displaced into the profane fields of literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis. At the same time, under the guise of revisionary interpretation, the Temple and Scripture are profaned. The lines become crossed: who knows now which is the holy, and which the profane: which the leopards and which the priests?
The Republic of Plato
From the Renaissance to the nineteenth century, Latin and Greek were compulsory subjects in almost all European universities, and most early modern scholars published their research and conducted international correspondence in Latin. Latin had continued in use in Western Europe long after the fall of the Roman empire as the lingua franca of the educated classes and of law, diplomacy, religion and university teaching. The flight of Greek scholars to the West after the fall of Constantinople in 1453 gave impetus to the study of ancient Greek literature and the Greek New Testament. Eventually, just as nineteenth-century reforms of university curricula were beginning to erode this ascendancy, developments in textual criticism and linguistic analysis, and new ways of studying ancient societies, especially archaeology, led to renewed enthusiasm for the Classics. This collection offers works of criticism, interpretation and synthesis by the outstanding scholars of the nineteenth century.