scholarly journals Flowers of evil: Constructing the wicked in Wisdom of Solomon

2021 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 108-121
Author(s):  
Jiani Sun
Keyword(s):  
Mirror Effect ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Wisdom Literature ◽  
Divine Intervention ◽  
Divine Justice ◽  
Social Theories ◽  
Wisdom Of Solomon ◽  
Literary Device ◽  
Divine Mercy ◽  
The Relationship

The distinction between the good and the wicked is common in wisdom literature. Although the distinction can be viewed as ubiquitous, I would like to problematize it by considering the literary device deployed in constructing the archetypes of the good and the wicked. Specifically, I analyze the depiction of the wicked in chapters 1–6 in Wisdom of Solomon and argue that the construction of the wicked in Wisdom is indispensable in understanding how the righteous obtain wisdom through divine protection and acceptance of divine provision. First, I offer a close reading of the text, mainly Chapters 1–6, and parse out the ways of depicting the wicked in Wisdom of Solomon. In particular, I highlight the “collectivity” of the crowd, as opposed to a “single” righteous individual or group. Social theories of the crowd are critical to my formulation of the characteristics of the wicked. Second, I examine the relationship between the wicked and the righteous, and propose the idea of “a mirror effect” in these antithetical depictions. The mirror effect exhibits didactic values, as it instructs one to pursue righteousness and shun from evil. Third, I focus on the interaction between God, the righteous, and the wicked and suggest that divine intervention in helping the righteous stand firm among the wicked manifests both divine justice and divine mercy.

China–India Myths in Xu Dishan’s ‘Goddess of Supreme Essence’

2021 ◽  
pp. 67-93
Author(s):  
Gal Gvili
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Exchange ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Cautionary Tale ◽  
Modern Life ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Ancient India ◽  
China And India ◽  
The Past ◽  
Literary Device ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter analyses the scholarship of prominent May Fourth writer Xu Dishan as gateway for understanding his fiction. A close examination of his engagement with Indian religions and mythology in his fiction constitutes a vision of a China–India literary horizon through a literary device termed as ‘transregional metonymy’: tropes that travelled between China and India through the cultural exchange of myths. The chapter elaborates on this literary device through a close reading of Xu Dishan’s ‘Goddess of Supreme Essence’ (1923). The reading shows how a shared China–India figurative domain emerges in the story to offer a new understanding of myths and how they function in modern life. It also suggests that instead of rewriting the past, myths can rewrite the present; instead of using myths to establish a national culture, literature can use myths to imagine a transregional horizon. Focusing on India to think about the nature of storytelling and the relationship between myth and reality, Xu Dishan undid the binary distinction between ancient India as a soul brother and colonial India as a cautionary tale.

The Justice and Mercy of God

2020 ◽  
pp. 79-110
Author(s):  
Mary Sirridge
Keyword(s):  
Eleventh Century ◽  
First Century ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Divine Justice ◽  
Divine Mercy ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Justice And Mercy

In his eleventh-century Proslogion St. Anselm puts forward the view that, far from being an exception to divine justice, divine mercy is the highest form of divine justice. Anselm’s cryptic reasoning is initially puzzling. It becomes more accessible if we notice that he is taking as a model the theory of imperial clemency put forward by the first-century CE Stoic Seneca in his De Clementia, in which it is argued that imperial clemency is the highest form of justice. Anselm does not quote or make reference to Seneca’s work, and so the case for the relationship between the two works has to be made on internal grounds, but recent scholarship has shown that Senecan materials were readily available in Anselm’s milieu and that there are other cases in which he seems to be using Senecan material.

A Reading of Westcott's Gospel of Creation: An Early Venture into Ecological Theology?

2013 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 185-202
Author(s):  
Duncan Reid
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Ecological Theology ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Science And Theology ◽  
Doctrine Of Creation ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

AbstractIn response to the contemporary ecological movement, ecological perspectives have become a significant theme in the theology of creation. This paper asks whether antecedents to this growing significance might predate the concerns of our times and be discernible within the diverse interests of nineteenth-century Anglican thinking. The means used here to examine this possibility is a close reading of B. F. Westcott's ‘Gospel of Creation’. This will be contextualized in two directions: first with reference to the understanding of the natural world in nineteenth-century English popular thought, and secondly with reference to the approach taken to the doctrine of creation by three late twentieth-century Anglican writers, two concerned with the relationship between science and theology in general, and a third concerned more specifically with ecology.

Wisdom and Wisdom Literature

2021 ◽  
pp. xxii-14
Author(s):  
Will Kynes
Keyword(s):  
Paradigm Shift ◽  
Wisdom Literature ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The Future ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter introduces the volume by arguing that the study of biblical wisdom is in the midst of a potential paradigm shift, as interpreters are beginning to reconsider the relationship between the concept of wisdom in the Bible and the category Wisdom Literature. This offers an opportunity to explore how the two have been related in the past, in the history of Jewish and Christian interpretation, how they are connected in the present, as three competing primary approaches to Wisdom study have developed, and how they could be treated in the future, as new possibilities for understanding wisdom with insight from before and beyond the development of the Wisdom Literature category are emerging.

Wisdom Literature of the Apocrypha and Related Compositions of the Second Temple Era

2021 ◽  
pp. 270-283
Author(s):  
John Kampen
Keyword(s):  
Second Temple ◽  
Wisdom Literature ◽  
Literary Production ◽  
Ben Sira ◽  
Wisdom Of Solomon ◽  
Jewish Writers

By examining the approaches to wisdom evident in its literary production, it is possible to get a glimpse of the diversity of Second Temple Jewish viewpoints. The identification of one trajectory is an attempt to describe and evaluate certain trends that are apparent in the literature without being able to make the claim that such an attempt is exhaustive. On the basis of the evidence available in one specific trajectory, Ben Sira and Wisdom of Solomon make the closest correlations between wisdom and Torah. While not providing evidence that the Torah was valued primarily as a collection of Pentateuchal law, it is apparent why these two compositions were valued by Jewish writers for whom this became the case.

Social identity, rationality, creativity

2021 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna-Maria Kanzola ◽  
Konstantina Papaioannou ◽  
Panagiotis E. Petrakis
Keyword(s):  
Social Identity ◽  
Social Identity Theory ◽  
Identity Theory ◽  
Content Type ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Theories ◽  
Seeking Behavior ◽  
Life Improvement ◽  
Components Analysis ◽  
The Relationship

PurposeThis study examines the relationship between rationality and creativity by means of social identity theory for the Greek society (2019–2020).Design/methodology/approachThe outline of the social identity was given through self-categorization via a distributed questionnaire. The types of behavior (rational, nonrational and loss-averse) were determined by using questions based on the Allais paradox. Principal components analysis (PCA) is used to extract the causal relationships.FindingsThe study findings demonstrate that rational individuals are more prompt to creative personality than nonrational individuals. Rational individuals are motivated to pursue creativity through life-improvement goals. Loss-averse individuals are driven through the contradictive incentive of adventure-seeking behavior without, however, being willing to easily give up their established assets.Originality/valueThis article contributes by explaining creativity among rational, nonrational and loss-averse individuals as a product of social identity theory. This contributes to the literature, by proposing that the application of social theories in economics could constitute a different foundation for economics. This refers to the notion of the social microfoundations of the political economy and macroeconomics.

scholarly journals On the Exception of Hannah Arendt

2015 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 684-704 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ayça Çubukçu
Keyword(s):  
Hannah Arendt ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Banality Of Evil ◽  
The Relationship

This article offers a close reading of Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. It argues that in this text, Arendt consistently, even obsessively, evaluates the legal and moral challenges posed by Eichmann’s trial through the relationship between exception and rule. The article contends that the analytical lens of the exception allows us to appreciate the perplexities that Eichmann in Jerusalem presents – some fifty years after the book’s publication – from a still uncommon perspective, and enables us to attend in new ways to Arendt’s own suppositions, propositions, and contradictions in this text.

scholarly journals ‘A Kind of Sensory, Strange Thing to Experience’: Speaking Environmental Disaster in the Sea Empress Project Archive

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy Cooper
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Change ◽  
Social Processes ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Environmental Disaster ◽  
The Past ◽  
Sensory Experiences ◽  
Sensory Event ◽  
Modern Britain ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship

This article explores embodied encounters with the Sea Empress oil spill of 1996 and their representation in oral narratives. Through a close reading of the personal testimonies collected in the Sea Empress Project archive, I examine the relationship between intense sensory experiences of environmental change and everyday interpretations of the disaster and its legacy. The art­icle first outlines the ways in which this collection of voices reveals sensory memories, embodied affects and narrative choices to be deeply entwined in oral representations of the spill, disclosing a ‘sensory event’ that created a powerful awareness of both environmental surroundings and their relationship to everyday social processes. Then, reading these narratives against-the-grain, I argue that narrators’ accounts tell a paradoxical story of a disaster that most now wish to forget, and reveal an ambivalent legacy of environmental change that is similarly consigned to the past. Finally, I relate this social forgetting of the Sea Empress to the wider history of environmental consciousness in modern Britain.

scholarly journals W czasie wiersza. "Posłańcy" Stanisława Grochowiaka

2021 ◽  
pp. 10-25
Author(s):  
Helena Hejman
Keyword(s):  
Close Reading ◽  
Problem Of Time ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Reading Experiment ◽  
The Relationship

This paper – presenting a close reading of Stanisław Grochowiak’s poem Posłańcy [The Messengers] – proposes reflections on the “time of the poem”. It deals with the issue of experiencing different temporalities while reading (when and where you are while experiencing written words; what is the relationship between the reader's "real" and "fictional" – immersed in the process of reading – lives), and proposes a depiction of pace moderations in the analyzed work – of its own, differential dynamics. The problem of time and velocity is the starting point for a hermeneutic interpretation, or rather hermeneutic exercises (inspired by Raymond Queneau's Exercises in Style): a conceptual, anthropological and semiotic reading experiment carried out on Grochowiak's poem. This essay is an attempt to pave a few paths for understanding The Messengers and their messages. Following in the footsteps of the title characters (with the help of associations and seemingly trivial observations) becomes a cognitive and imaginative adventure, a revolve around an ineffable, dark mystery of the poem (perhaps of all poems and their messengers).

scholarly journals Aracoeli di Elsa Morante

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Silvia Camilotti
Keyword(s):  
Personal Experience ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Elsa Morante ◽  
Literary Device ◽  
Literary Devices

I propose a close reading of Elsa Morante’s latest book, Aracoeli, drawing upon three key literary devices: escapism, metamorphosis and paradox, which I use in relation to both the principal characters in the book, Aracoeli and her son Emanuele. Moreover, my reading will also bring to light the author’s personal experience and how it is relevant to the novel particularly in relation to the literary device of escapism.

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