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Meir Sternberg’s classic study is “an important book for those who seek to take the Bible seriously as a literary work.” (Adele Berlin, Prooftexts) In “a book to read and then reread” (Modern Language Review), Meir Sternberg “has accomplished an enormous task, enriching our understanding of the theoretical basis of Biblical narrative and giving us insight into a remarkable number of particular texts.” (Journal of the American Academy of Religion). The result is a “a brilliant work” (Choice) distinguished “both for his comprehensiveness and for the clearly-avowed faith stance from which he understands and interprets the strategies of the biblical narratives.” (Theological Studies). The Poetics of Biblical Narrative shows, in Adele Berlin’s words, “more clearly and emphatically than any book I know, that the Bible is a serious literary work―a text manifesting a highly sophisticated and successful narrative poetics.”
.."". this is one of the few books on narrative worth reading and rereading, a study that will make -- or should make -- a difference in the way we read narrative."" -- Nineteenth Century Fiction ""This is a remarkable book: original, clear-sighted, and luminously focused on a subject that has never been explored nearly so systematically or intensively.""A -- Dorrit Cohn, Harvard University This book, long out of print, is now available in a paperback edition, providing another window into one of the most exciting minds working in the areas of literary and biblical literary criticism.
These two special issues focus on estrangement, a concept that pervades twentieth-century literary study and related fields. Estrangement lies at the heart of human experience in art and life: how the familiar is made strange, perceptible, disturbing, as if never before encountered. Also known as defamiliarization or disautomatization, estrangement originated as a form of literary and poetic theory within Russian formalism in 1917 and was elaborated largely through the work of Viktor Borisovich Shklovsky. In essence, estrangement is a method of analyzing the artfulness, rather than the psychological meaning or logical message, of imaginative works of prose and poetry. Each essay in these spe...
Offers perspectives on the nature of narrative and narrativity, genre theory, narrative semiotics and communication theory. This book includes contributions, which center on the specificity of literary fiction, and the chapters investigate a different dimension of narrativity with many issues dealt with in innovative ways.
Growing out of a conference entitled Literary Theory volume reveal, among other more particularistic points, a fundamental overt disagreement regarding the question of coherence in narrative point of view, i.e. between the assumption or discovery of coherent and unitary narratives and narrators, the critique of this assumption, and the assumption or discovery of its opposite. No index. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
In this comprehensive book, the first of its kind, the author shares the work of many feminist biblical scholars who have examined women's stories in the last twenty-five years. These stories are powerful accounts of women in the Old Testament--stories that have profoundly affected how women understand themselves. -- Publisher description.
The Poetics of Biblical Narrative, Sternberg's last book, established a new level of sophistication for biblical analysis. In Hebrews between Cultures, he shifts his focus from individual identity to the group, in this case the Hebrews. Sternberg's analysis of the development in the Bible of the Hebrew identity (and alternate identities) is brilliant, challenging, intellectually rigorous and unusual, and almost always unexpected and dramatic.
The stories of Elisha the prophet have received scant attention in recent years, perhaps because they are so enigmatic. This study places the Elisha material firmly within the narrative of Genesis-2 Kings, and examines the effect these stories have on the reader's perception of the role of the 'prophet'. Using the narratological theories of Mieke Bal, David Jobling and others, Bergen shows that the Elisha stories present prophetism in a negative light, confining prophets to a rather limited scope of action in the narrative world.
Using key features of Ricoeur's narrative theory, this creative Asian re-reading of Moses' reverse migration in Exodus 4: 18-26 charts the way for a multi-dimensional OT hermeneutic which explores the theme of identity formation in light of the liminal experience of migration.
For more than two decades now, cognitive science has been making overtures to literature and literary studies. Only recently, however, cognitive linguistics and poetics seem to be moving towards a more serious and reciprocal type of interdisciplinarity. In coupling cognitive linguistics and poetics, cognitive poeticians aim to offer cognitive readings of literary texts and formulate specific hypotheses concerning the relationship between aesthetic meaning effects and patterns in the cognitive construal and processing of literary texts. One of the basic assumptions of the endeavour is that some of the key topics in poetics (such as the construction of text worlds, characterization, narrative ...