Gospel as Personal Knowing: Theological Reflections on Not Just a Literary Genre

2012 ◽  
Vol 68 (4) ◽  
pp. 413-423
Author(s):  
William Franke
2007 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 71-83
Author(s):  
Irene Morra
Keyword(s):  

Irene Morra shows how the conflict between words and music that was contested in “Billy Budd” can be extended to almost all modern British opera. Morra argues persuasively that a number of modernist writers came to view the libretto “as an alternative literary genre, one that would allow for the expression of literary ideals of musicality”.


2013 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 119-135
Author(s):  
Giles Whiteley

Walter Pater's late-nineteenth-century literary genre of the imaginary portrait has received relatively little critical attention. Conceived of as something of a continuum between his role as an art critic and his fictional pursuits, this essay probes the liminal space of the imaginary portraits, focusing on the role of the parergon, or frame, in his portraits. Guided by Pater's reading of Kant, who distinguishes between the work (ergon) and that which lies outside of the work (the parergon), between inside and outside, and contextualised alongside the analysis of Derrida, who shows how such distinctions have always already deconstructed themselves, I demonstrate a similar operation at work in the portraits. By closely analysing the parerga of two of Pater's portraits, ‘Duke Carl of Rosenmold’ (1887) and ‘Apollo in Picardy’ (1893), focusing on his partial quotation of Goethe in the former, and his playful autocitation and impersonation of Heine in the latter, I argue that Pater's parerga seek to destabilise the relationship between text and context so that the parerga do not lie outside the text but are implicated throughout in their reading, changing the portraits constitutively. As such, the formal structure of the parergon in Pater's portraits is also a theoretical fulcrum in his aesthetic criticism and marks that space where the limits of, and distinctions between, art and life become blurred.


This volume provides the first comprehensive overview of the extant Greek and Latin letter collections of late antiquity (ca. 300-600 C.E.). Bringing together an international team of historians, classicists, and scholars of religion, it illustrates how letter collections advertised an image of the letter writer and introduces the social and textual histories of each collection. Nearly every chapter focuses on the letter collection of a different late ancient author—from the famous (or even infamous) to the obscure—and investigates its particular issues of content, arrangement, and publication context. On the whole, the volume reveals how late antique letter collections operated as a discrete literary genre with its own conventions, transmission processes, and self-presentational agendas while offering new approaches to interpret both larger letter collections and the individual letters contained within them. Each chapter contributes to a broad argument that scholars should read letter collections as they do representatives of other late antique literary genres, as single texts made up of individual components, with larger thematic and literary characteristics that are as important as those of their component parts.


Author(s):  
Sergey Nickolsky

The question of the Russian man – his past, present and future – is the central one in the philosophy of history. Unfortunately, at present this area of philosophy is not suffciently developed in Russia. Partly the reason for this situation is the lack of understanding by researchers of the role played by Russian classical literature and its philosophizing writers in historiosophy. The Hunting Sketches, a collection of short stories by I.S. Turgenev, is a work still undervalued, not fully considered not only in details but also in general meanings. And this is understandable because it is the frst systematic encyclopedia of Russian worldview, which is not envisaged by the literary genre. To a certain extent, Turgenev’s line is continued by I. Goncharov (the theme of the mind and heart), L. Tolstoy (the theme of the living and the dead, nature and society, the people and the lords), F. Dostoevsky (natural and rational rights), A. Chekhov (worthy and vulgar life). This article examines the philosophical nature of The Hunting Sketches, its structure and content. According to author’s opinion, stories can be divided into ten groups according to their dominant meanings. Thus, in The Hunting Sketches the main Russian types are depicted: “natural man,” rational, submissive, cunning, honest, sensitive, passionate, poetic, homeless, suffering, calmly accepting death, imbued with the immensity of the world. In the image and the comments of the wandering protagonist, Ivan Turgenev reveals his own philosophical credo, which he defnes as a moderate liberalism – freedom of thought and action, without prejudice to others.


Author(s):  
Eva Mārtuža

An innovative view to theological texts as a literary genre has been established in research of the modern religions and designated as theopoetics, because, irrespective of whether a theological text is written in the poetic genre, in the form of a story or the style of a more dense, theoretical prose, it is based on the poesis: innovative, intuitive and an imaginary composition of the authors where the central figure is God. Therefore, approximately ten thousand recorded and published folk songs, as well as other Latvian folklore texts about God, are equal to theopoetics as a genre of creative writing with its specific expression tools. Folk songs are a product of purposeful human spiritual/intellectual activity and imagination, a typical cultural phenomenon of the relevant society, which helps to study the public’s views about the perception of God. To approach adequately to analysis and interpretation of such texts, in the late 20th century, a new method of research on religious texts – theopoetics – was established. Theopoetics is a method of analysing religious texts that encourages us to look at the ancient metaphors of God from another angle. It explores the language possibilities of figuratively creating God’s patterns, unlike the previous “scientific” God’s theories as the systematic attempt of theology to find God through the living (“incarnated”) God. Theopoetics theorists accept reality as a source of divine revelation as well as personal experience and metaphor-influenced divine understanding in various religions. This method allows to establish the essence and possible interpretations of the basic metaphors used in every individual religion: 1) critically weigh up the previous explanations of God; 2) study the interaction of applied metaphors, models and concepts within religion; 3) offers the potential of transformative, revolutionary models, using the language and metaphor layer that is widely understandable and used by people in everyday life. Research of metaphors does not impose objective or general criteria for assessing understanding of God; therefore, the aim of theopoetical discourse is not to prevent competing interpretations but to multiply the number of perceptions of God, to extend the emotional feeling, and to reveal new opinions. Folk songs figuratively represent God in metaphors and comparisons, but the theopoetics method has not been applied in the previous studies of God either because it is a relatively new methodological system, or because God’s perception in the folk songs has not been the focus of researchers of contemporary religions.


Author(s):  
Horace Walpole

‘Look, my lord! See heaven itself declares against your impious intentions’ The Castle of Otranto (1764) is the first supernatural English novel and one of the most influential works of Gothic fiction. It inaugurated a literary genre that will be forever associated with the effects that Walpole pioneered. Professing to be a translation of a mysterious Italian tale from the darkest Middle Ages, the novel tells of Manfred, prince of Otranto, whose fear of an ancient prophecy sets him on a course of destruction. After the grotesque death of his only son, Conrad, on his wedding day, Manfred determines to marry the bride–to–be. The virgin Isabella flees through a castle riddled with secret passages. Chilling coincidences, ghostly visitations, arcane revelations, and violent combat combine in a heady mix that terrified the novel's first readers. In this new edition Nick Groom examines the reasons for its extraordinary impact and the Gothic culture from which it sprang. The Castle of Otranto was a game-changer, and Walpole the writer who paved the way for modern horror exponents.


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