An Invitation to Biblical Poetry

An Invitation to Biblical Poetry is an accessibly written introduction to biblical poetry that emphasizes the aesthetic dimensions of poems and their openness to varieties of context. It demonstrates the irreducible complexity of poetry as a verbal art and considers the intellectual work poems accomplish as they offer aesthetic experiences to people who read or hear them. Chapters walk the reader through some of the diverse ways biblical poems are organized through techniques of voicing, lineation, and form, and describe how the poems’ figures are both culturally and historically bound and dependent on later reception. The discussions consider examples from different texts of the Bible, including poems inset in prose narratives, prophecies, psalms, and wisdom literature. Each chapter ends with a reading of a psalm that offers an acute example of the dimension under discussion. Students and general readers are invited to richer and deeper readings of ancient poems and the subjects, problems, and convictions that occupy their imagination.

"The Horse on which Words Ride": Proverbial Narrative in Toyin Falola's A Mouth Sweeter than Salt

Literature and oral tradition share a symbiotic relationship. Toyin Faiola the author of A Mouth Sweeter than Salt has produced a highly engaging memoir. The text is set in Ibadan, Ode Aje and Ilorin. We find a rich and knowledgeable exploitation of oral forms which the author uses within the frame of the biographical genre. Through the use of proverbial narration, Fa­Iola presents a tale replete with magic, religion, divination, spirituality and various folklore elements. The oral forms Faiola has used in the text come from the oral character of everyday life, prose narratives, songs, proverbs and proverb-like expressions while exploring the themes of innocence, curiosity and growth. This stylistic feature of narration is common in African story telling sessions. In both the traditional and modern context, the African prov­erb fulfils its social and communicative function in various forms. Faiola pres­ents an inseparable relationship of mutual exchange between the oral and written traditions. However, our point of emphasis is to evaluate the context and usage of the proverbial narration with a restriction to proverbs which deal with animals. The qualities attributed to animals in the proverbs and sayings figuratively and metaphorically describe people's appearance, characteristics and deeds.

Ṣàngó’s Incest, Oxala’s Equanimity and the Permanence of African Myth-Legends in Atlantic Yorùbá Dramaturgy

This article discusses the permanence of Yorùbá myth-legends in Atlantic Yorùbá dramaturgy. The dramaturgy is conceived as a genre of Atlantic Yorùbá literature produced by the scions of Yorùbá slaves in the New World and some òrìṣà worshippers in the Americas who claim an affiliative relationship with continental Yorùbá. I argue in favour of a myth-legend taxonomy of oral prose narratives as against the Western classification of traditional tales into myth, legend and folktale. Yorùbá traditional tales, also called pataki by the Atlantic Yorùbá, are dubbed myth-legends due to the shared features of myths and legends immanent in them. The article examines these traditional tales, drawing insights from psychoanalytic and postcolonial models to foreground the Ọbàtálá–Jesus parallelism, primeval rivalry between Ṣàngó and Ògún, and the paraphilia of certain Yorùbá hero-gods. It affirms the Euhemerisation of these deities to accentuate their apotheosis and possession of human attributes.

“life/death” binary opposition in folk prose narratives

The article is dedicated to the characteristics of the “life/death” explication in prose narratives of Slavic folklore in particular. The authors were able to study and understand the archaic beliefs immanent for the ancient Slavs through researching the words and fairy-tale images that personified life and death in this type of literature. The relevance of this topic derives from the insufficiency in the research of representation of “life/death” binary opposition in various languages and in folk prose narratives. This study contributes to understanding the attitude towards this binary opposition in the distant past and its impact on the modern people’s attitude towards life and death. The purpose of the study is to investigate the binary opposition and its perception among people through folk prose narratives. The authors chose an integrated methodological approach for researching this issue. It helps to comprehensively analyse the attitude towards the binary opposition. The study successfully used the methodology and techniques applied in humanities, primarily in philology and philosophy. While researching the topic the authors found out that in some cases this binary opposition is perceived figuratively, and in others cases it is dramatically diametrical, which is reflected in fairy tales, proverbs, curses, etc.

Melusine

The Middle English Melusine is a prose romance produced by an anonymous author in the late 15th century. It is a reasonably faithful translation of the French Roman de Mélusine, completed by Jean d’Arras in 1393 at the behest of Jean, Duc de Berri. Jean’s original text, together with a verse version, Roman de Partenay, penned by La Coudrette c. 1401–1405, enjoyed immense popularity in medieval western Europe, with a rich array of manuscripts and incunabula being produced and translations emerging in German, Dutch, and Castilian. There also exists an English translation of the verse romance, The Romans of Parthenay (c. 1500). A pseudohistorical narrative weaving elements of romance and chronicle, Melusine traces the foundation of the House of Lusignan to its mythical ancestor. Cursed to metamorphose into a snake below the waist on Saturday evenings, Melusine’s salvation is contingent upon her marrying a man who swears never to learn of or speak about her secret. After marrying a nobleman of Poitiers, Melusine quickly transforms the wild landscape of Poitou in northwestern France into a rich, cultivated, and prosperous region, constructing an impressive series of fortresses and churches within a matter of days. The first fortress becomes the realm’s main seat of power and is named “Lusignan” in honor of its patroness. Melusine and her husband soon have ten sons, most of whom bear strange facial markings that seem to allude to a supernatural parentage. Despite this, many of the sons venture off on crusade and conquest, spreading their dynasty’s influence across Europe and the Near East. Eventually, Melusine’s snake tail is discovered by her husband; when he reveals her secret to the court, she is forced to leave the human world forever and roam the Earth as a dragon until Judgement Day. As her curse dictates, Melusine must return to Lusignan to hail death and the transferal of power within her genealogical line. Little is known about the precise origins of the Middle English Melusine. As with many insular romances, the translator and patron remain anonymous, though the text’s colossal length would indicate a wealthy clientele. Contrary to literary trends in France and Burgundy, prose narratives written in English appeared relatively late in the 15th century, only truly gaining popularity after the arrival of Caxton’s printing press. The Middle English Melusine is therefore an important example of England’s early prose romances in the vernacular.

Romance

“Romance” is a term that has been variously applied to long-form verse narratives, episodic prose narratives, drama, stories from late Greek antiquity, and a popular subgenre of contemporary mass market fiction. In the 18th and 19th centuries it vied with “novel” as the standard term for the genre (before the latter won out to become part of our common vocabulary). Romance has also become a standard division of Shakespeare’s works, a dramatic genre that, beginning in the 19th century, stood alongside comedy, tragedy, and history as one of the cornerstones of the canon. Indeed, readers and scholars use “romance” so promiscuously as to suggest the near impossibility of drawing its definition with any clarity or meaning. Is the word merely an empty signifier for an incoherent concept? A vague label that is “generic” in the most unhelpful sense? Perhaps, contrarily, “romance” has power as a label because of its variability and range. On a practical level, understanding the pliant ways that readers, publishers, and writers have used this term provides insight to one of the richest (and perhaps oldest) veins of storytelling. Romance also gives us a view of how those same traditions ultimately derive from more ancient and esoteric forms. As it relates to a theory of genre, too, romance has been indispensable. Two of the most important treatments of genre theory, by Northrop Frye and Fredric Jameson, center on romance as a literary and historical practice. To study romance is therefore to study the shapes and traditions of genre itself; to theorize romance is to provide a history and conceptual framework for how genres have worked and continue to work within storytelling practices.

Becoming Backpack: Towards a Counter-Inscription of Young Adult Collegian Identity Work

This article invites readers to encounter the author’s early attempts at engaging creatively with data produced during a research project called Life Lines: The Art of Being Alive to Young Adulthood. Launched in January 2019, the Life Lines project was conceived as a critical participatory arts-engaged research endeavor aimed at opening up conventional theoretical wisdom about the nature of young adult college student identity formation. In addition to providing details of the inquiry project’s design and aims, a series of visual and poetic prose narratives open and become threaded throughout the article. These multimodal expressive forms function as a type of creative counter-inscription device, working both to complicate identity development models that limit subjectivity to human consciousness and agency, and to illustrate a more expansive, somatically attuned, and materially-entangled set of practices and productions of young adult identity work’s work and its study.

Letters

Epistolary writing finds expression everywhere in Charles Brockden Brown’s career. We see it in his praxis, as he writes epistolary novels, periodical essays, and letters. We also see Brown articulate a theoretical explanation for his devotion to the form in his actual correspondence and his fiction. A letter writer, unlike a narrator, self-consciously constructs identity as a textual performance. And letters, unlike prose narratives, draw conspicuous attention to communicative exchange and to the ways that communication links (and fails to link) individuals and groups across time and space. This chapter focuses on two longer sequences in Brown’s correspondence and the epistolary fragment the “Henrietta Letters” as source material for Brown’s epistolary praxis and theory.

The Imperative and Deontic in the Pentateuch: Specificity of the Greek (LXX), Latin (Vulg) and Aramaic Translation

В данной статье изучается императив и деонтическая модальность индикатива имперфекта, а также перфекта с вавом-последовательности древнееврейского текста Пятикнижия Моисеева. В качестве материала для исследования выбраны диалогические высказывания из прозаических повествований и законодательных текстов. Благодаря такому подходу обнаружились различные методы перевода еврейского текста. Так, если в первом жанре все переводы, обозначенные в теме статьи, выполнены близко к масоретскому тексту, за некоторыми исключениями, обнаруженными в LXX, Vulg и в Пешитте, то в текстах законодательного жанра не все переводы соответствуют библейскому тексту оригинала. Особенно это касается Пешитты. Благодаря полученным результатам исследования, актуализировалось изучение деонтической модальности греческого, латинского и арамейских языков, по крайней мере, LXX, Vulg, таргумов и Пешитты. This article studies the imperative and deontic modality of the indicative of the imperfect, as well as the perfect with the wāwsequence of the Hebrew text of the Pentateuch of Moses. Dialogical utterances, which are present in prose narratives and in legislative texts, were chosen as the research material. Thanks to this approach, various methods of translating the Hebrew text were discovered. So, if in the first genre all the translations, designated in the subject of the article, are close to the Masoretic text, with some exceptions found in LXX, Vulg and Peshitta, then in the legislative genre texts not all translations correspond to the original biblical text. This is especially true about Peshitta. Due to the results of the study, the study of the deontic modality of the Greek, Latin and Aramaic languages, at least LXX, Vulg, Targums and Peshitta, was actualized.

The Concept of Justice in Buddhism: A Case Study of Caṇḍāla in Jātakaṭṭhakathā

This article aims to study the function of Caṇḍāla, the outer caste character in Jātakaṭṭhakathā, the stories of the prior lives of the Buddha, and to study the relationship between the Caṇḍāla characters and the concept of justice in these Jātaka stories. In order to construct the concept of justice in Buddhism, and the framework of this study, Rawls’ theory regarding justice as fairness is used as a guideline for exploration of the Sutta, the Buddhist canon. The study reveals that the Caṇḍāla characters appear in nine Jātakas, playing significant roles in parts of many the prose narratives and the connection part of the story in order to illustrate that a low caste person can attain enlightenment. Three concepts of Dharma are conveyed by the Caṇḍāla characters in Jātakaṭṭhakathā: firstly, defilement causes humans in every caste to have suffering; secondly, every occurrence in one’s life depends on karma; and thirdly, humans in every caste have the potential to accomplish wisdom by understanding the path to eradicate suffering.