This book considers the early history of Jewish-Christian relations focussing on traditions about the fallen angels. In the Book of the Watchers, an Enochic apocalypse from the third century BCE, the ...'sons of God' of Gen 6:1–4 are accused of corrupting humankind through their teachings of metalworking, cosmetology, magic, and divination. By tracing the transformations of this motif in Second Temple, Rabbinic, and early medieval Judaism and early, late antique, and Byzantine Christianity, this book sheds light on the history of interpretation of Genesis, the changing status of Enochic literature, and the place of parabiblical texts and traditions in the interchange between Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages. In the process, it explores issues such as the role of text-selection in the delineation of community boundaries and the development of early Jewish and Christian ideas about the origins of evil on the earth.
Writing Anthropologists, Sounding Primitives
re-examines the poetry and scholarship of three of the foremost
figures in the twentieth-century history of U.S.-American
anthropology: Edward Sapir, ...Margaret Mead, and Ruth Benedict. While
they are widely renowned for their contributions to Franz Boas's
early twentieth-century school of cultural relativism, what is far
less known is their shared interest in probing the representational
potential of different media and forms of writing. This dimension
of their work is manifest in Sapir's critical writing on music and
literature and Mead's groundbreaking work with photography and
film. Sapir, Mead, and Benedict together also wrote more than one
thousand poems, which in turn negotiate their own media status and
rivalry with other forms of representation. A. Elisabeth Reichel
presents the first sustained study of the published and unpublished
poetry of Sapir, Mead, and Benedict, charting this largely
unexplored body of work and relevant selections of the writers'
scholarship. In addition to its expansion of early
twentieth-century literary canons, Writing Anthropologists,
Sounding Primitives contributes to current debates about the
relations between different media, sign systems, and modes of sense
perception in literature and other media. Reichel offers a unique
contribution to the history of anthropology by synthesizing and
applying insights from the history of writing, sound studies, and
intermediality studies to poetry and scholarship produced by noted
early twentieth-century U.S.-American cultural anthropologists.
"Storyworlds," mental models of context and environment within which characters function, is a concept used to describe what happens in narrative. Narratologists agree that the concept of storyworlds ...best captures the ecology of narrative interpretation by allowing a fuller appreciation of the organization of both space and time, by recognizing reading as a process that encourages readers to compare the world of a text to other possible worlds, and by highlighting the power of narrative to immerse readers in new and unfamiliar environments.
Focusing on the work of writers from Trinidad and Nigeria, such as Sam Selvon and Ben Okri,The Storyworld Accordinvestigates and compares the storyworlds of nonrealist and postmodern postcolonial texts to show how such narratives grapple with the often-collapsed concerns of subjectivity, representation, and environment, bringing together these narratological and ecocritical concerns via a mode that Erin James calls econarratology. Arguing that postcolonial ecocriticism, like ecocritical studies, has tended to neglect imaginative representations of the environment in postcolonial literatures, James suggests that readings of storyworlds in postcolonial texts helps narrative theorists and ecocritics better consider the ways in which culture, ideologies, and social and environmental issues are articulated in narrative forms and structures, while also helping postcolonial scholars more fully consider the environment alongside issues of political subjectivity and sovereignty.
In Paul and The Restoration of Humanity in Light of Ancient Jewish Traditions, Aaron Sherwood questions the assumption of universalism in Pauline thought, demonstrating that relevant Pauline ...traditions depict a particularly Israelite restoration of humanity that perhaps plays a generative role in Paul's theology, mission, and apostolic self-identity.
American Civil-War era art critics James Jackson Jarves, Clarence Cook, and William J. Stillman classified styles and defined art in terms that have become fundamental to our modern periodization of ...the art of the nineteenth century. In Critical Shift, Karen Georgi re-reads many of their well-known texts, finding certain key discrepancies between their words and our historiography, pointing to unrecognized narrative desires. The book also studies ruptures and revolutionary breaks between “old” and “new” art, as well as the issue of the morality of “true” art. Georgi asserts that these concepts and their sometimes-loaded expression were part of larger rhetorical structures that gainsay the uses to which the key terms have been put in modern historiography. It has been more than fifty years since a book has been devoted to analyzing the careers of these three critics; and never before has their role in the historiography and periodization of American art been analyzed. The conclusions drawn from this close re-reading of well-known texts are significant for more than just our understanding of nineteenth century criticism. They challenge the fundamental nature of “historical context” in American art history.
Between present and past, visible and invisible, and sensation and idea, there is resonance—so philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty argued and so Jessica Wiskus explores in The Rhythm of Thought. ...Holding the poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé, the paintings of Paul Cézanne, the prose of Marcel Proust, and the music of Claude Debussy under Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological light, she offers innovative interpretations of some of these artists' masterworks, in turn articulating a new perspective on Merleau-Ponty's philosophy. More than merely recovering Merleau-Ponty's thought, Wiskus thinks according to it. First examining these artists in relation to noncoincidence—as silence in poetry, depth in painting, memory in literature, and rhythm in music—she moves through an array of their artworks toward some of Merleau-Ponty's most exciting themes: our bodily relationship to the world and the dynamic process of expression. She closes with an examination of synesthesia as an intertwining of internal and external realms and a call, finally, for philosophical inquiry as a mode of artistic expression. Structured like a piece of music itself, The Rhythm of Thought offers new contexts in which to approach art, philosophy, and the resonance between them.
Writing Back Winnett, Susan
2012, 2012-12-15
eBook
The migration of American artists and intellectuals to Europe in the early twentieth century has been amply documented and studied, but few scholars have examined the aftermath of their return home. ...Writing Back focuses on the memoirs of modernist writers and intellectuals who struggled with their return to America after years of living abroad.
Susan Winnett establishes repatriation as related to but significantly different from travel and exile. She engages in close readings of several writers-in-exile, including Henry James, Harold Stearns, Malcolm Cowley, and Gertrude Stein.
Writing Back examines how repatriation unsettles the self-construction of the “returning absentee” by challenging the fictions of national and cultural identity with which the writer has experimented during the time abroad. As both Americans and expatriates, these writers gained a unique perspective on American culture, particularly in terms of gender roles, national identity, artistic self-conception, mobility, and global culture.
Thirteenth-century Sufi poet, mystic, and legal scholar Muhyi al-Din ibn al-'Arabi gave deep and sustained attention to gender as integral to questions of human existence and moral personhood. ...Reading his works through a critical feminist lens, Sa'diyya Shaikh opens fertile spaces in which new and creative encounters with gender justice in Islam can take place. Grounding her work in Islamic epistemology, Shaikh attends to the ways in which Sufi metaphysics and theology might allow for fundamental shifts in Islamic gender ethics and legal formulations, addressing wide-ranging contemporary challenges including questions of women's rights in marriage and divorce, the politics of veiling, and women's leadership of ritual prayer.Shaikh deftly deconstructs traditional binaries between the spiritual and the political, private conceptions of spiritual development and public notions of social justice, and the realms of inner refinement and those of communal virtue. Drawing on the treasured works of Sufism, Shaikh raises a number of critical questions about the nature of selfhood, subjectivity, spirituality, and society to contribute richly to the prospects of Islamic feminism as well as feminist ethics more broadly.
