A Furnace and the Life of the Dead

2000 ◽  
pp. 257-274
Author(s):  
Clair Wills
Keyword(s):  
Close Reading ◽  
The Dead

Chapter eleven, written by Clair Wills, provides a close reading of Fisher’s A Furnace. In this chapter, Wills unpacks the poem’s most significant recurring motifs, including the mention of ghosts, politics, memory and immortality. She also focuses closely on the attention Fisher places on the burial of the dead, and analyses the poem’s portrayal of both religious and literary boundaries.

S(c)hibboleth

Shibboleth ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 86-99
Author(s):  
Marc Redfield
Keyword(s):  
New Testament ◽  
The Other ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Tower Of Babel ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The New Testament ◽  
The Dead

Language, Celan says, is the only thing that remains un-lost (unverloren) in the wake of the Holocaust. Celan opens language to this un, rendering as poetic thought what Derrida calls the monolingualism of the other. Shibboleth is the mark of the (m)other-tongue-speaker that is the other of and in language. It is the mark of an otherness that, as a close reading of the Tower of Babel story suggests, inheres in language even before the Lord descends to mix it. The Pentecost story in Acts provides a similar lesson: the New Testament story that redeems Babel introduces another kind of confusion. Poetry bears witness to the survival of language in withdrawing into its secret, speaking of, to, and from the dead, as an early draft of Celan’s “Schibboleth” affirms.

History (?) in the Damascus Document

2018 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 412-428
Author(s):  
Steven D. Fraade
Keyword(s):  
Social Memory ◽  
Dead Sea Scrolls ◽  
Dead Sea ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Historical Information ◽  
Damascus Document ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Over Time

Abstract While the Damascus Document, like other writings found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, has been mined for historical information, with which to reconstruct the history of the Yaḥad, including the process and conditions of its formation and development over time, the present study is interested in discerning the text’s own understanding of the place in history occupied by its community of auditors and learners. Particular attention will be given to the text’s recurring reference to its beginnings (“first ones”) and ends (“last ones”) and to its sense of living in a truncated time-between. Through the close reading of two hortatory sections of the text, the question of how the Yaḥad’s collective social memory informs its self-understanding and practices as it faces both backward and forward in time.

scholarly journals POSEBNOSTI JUDOVSKIH ŽALOSTINK IN ŽALNIH OBREDOV V PROTIJUDOVSKEM OKOLJUSPECIAL FEATURES OF JEWISH LAMENTS AND MOURNING RITUALS IN HONOR OF THE DEAD IN AN ANTI-SEMITIC ENVIRONMENT

Traditiones ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 19-47
Author(s):  
Irena Avsenik Nabergoj
Keyword(s):  
Close Reading ◽  
Literary Traditions ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Manuscript Tradition ◽  
The Dead ◽  
The Relationship

Prispevek z metodama pozornega branja in intertekstualne primerjave med različnimi kulturami in religijami odkriva posebnosti judovskih žalostink za umrlimi in judovskih žalnih obredov, kot so izpričani v žalostinkah Svetega pisma in v posvetopisemskih judovskih virih, na antičnih judovskih nagrobnih napisih, v tradicionalnih judovskih verskih praksah žalovanja, v srednjeveških judovskih literarnih tradicijah spomina na mučence in v komemoracijah za žrtvami holokavsta v moderni judovski poeziji. Raziskuje tudi odnos do trpljenja in smrti Judov, izpričan v slovenskem ljudskem izročilu in v izbranih delih slovenske rokopisne tradicije.***This contribution discloses, by using the methods of close reading and intertextual comparison with various cultures and religions, peculiarities of Jewish laments in honour of the dead and of Jewish mourning rituals, as they are witnessed in laments of the Bible and in post-Biblical Jewish sources, in ancient Jewish epitaphs, in Jewish traditional religious mourning practices, in medieval Jewish literary traditions of commemorating martyrs and in commemorations of holocaust victims in modern Jewish poetry. It deals also with the relationship to suffering and the death of Jews, as they are witnessed in Slovenian literary folklore and in selected works of Slovenian manuscript tradition.

Silko’s Vévé and the Web of Differing Versions

2019 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 89-112
Author(s):  
Reid Gómez
Keyword(s):  
Leslie Marmon Silko ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Language Philosophy ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Spiritual Possession ◽  
The Web

In Almanac of the Dead, Leslie Marmon Silko asks, who has spiritual possession of the Americas? This question cannot be answered outside of Silko’s premises: it is impossible for outsiders to know where Africa ends and America begins; and the truth resides in the web of differing versions. In this essay, I maintain that Silko’s novel is written as a vévé—a crossroads where Gods and ancestors are subjects capable of narration. Using Silko’s language philosophy and a through close reading of Clinton’s notebooks and radio broadcasts, I argue that slavery/colonization and black/Indian must always be thought together.

Translating Pablo Neruda's “Galope muerto”

PMLA ◽  
1978 ◽  
Vol 93 (2) ◽  
pp. 185-195 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Felstiner
Keyword(s):  
Close Reading ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Dynamic Form ◽  
The Dead

Pablo Neruda’s first noteworthy lyric was written in 1925, at a time of unrest not only in himself but in Chilean society as well. “Galope muerto” strains the mimetic capacity of poetry. Similes without a referent and present participles without a limiting verb leave the reader reaching for some hidden source, some inner principle of experience. A new verse translation can instigate and inform the close reading of “Galope muerto,” showing what Neruda was after: an image of dynamic form, to catch things consumed yet brimming with energy, contained yet astir with life. He moves from the “dead gallop” of his title toward indigenous American calabashes resting on the earth and yet swelling with life. Twenty years later, in his major poem, Alturas de Macchu Picchu, Neruda reanimated the Andean site, drawing on the image of suspended energy that he first explored in writing “Galope muerto.”

The Body in Qumran Literature: Flesh and Spirit, Purity and Impurity in the Dead Sea Scrolls

2016 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 155-182
Author(s):  
Alexandria Frisch ◽  
Lawrence H. Schiffman
Keyword(s):  
Dead Sea Scrolls ◽  
Dead Sea ◽  
The Body ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Corporate Entity ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Purity And Impurity

This article examines the concept of the body within a wide range of Qumran literature. In a comparison with the biblical tradition, which does not evince a consistent and systematic idea of the body, this article demonstrates that the sectarians developed their own somatic model. The sectarian model, as revealed through a close reading of such texts as Hodayot, 1QS, 1QSa, CD and 1QM, is one that repeatedly emphasized the body as a corporate entity comprised jointly of flesh and spirit. This article then reexamines the same Qumran texts to show that this concept of the body explains the extreme focus on purity at Qumran, particularly the sectarian conflation of moral and ritual purification. A final comparison with Philo, who espoused a dualistic model of the body, underscores just how truly unique the sectarian view of the body and purity was among early Jews.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document