[DOWNLOAD] "Principle, Narrative, Commandment (Special FEATURE)" by Christianity and Literature " eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Principle, Narrative, Commandment (Special FEATURE)
- Author : Christianity and Literature
- Release Date : January 22, 2007
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 185 KB
Description
The three words of my title are meant to refer to three chief ways in which the Bible has been appropriated for Christian critical discourse. And by that I mean both discourse about scripture and discourse about literature that is in some way linked to the understanding of scripture. I will not discuss the largely historical and contextual ways in which "secular" literary criticism has accounted for the Bible, but only the ways in which scripture has been encountered by Christian critics. When Christians do literary criticism, where does scripture appear, if at all, on our intellectual and moral horizons? My argument, in brief, is that we have historically been much more comfortable with the implications of the first two terms than with those of the third. And I think that, though our sympathies have been very understandable and the direction we have taken perhaps necessary, we now have a problem. By my first term, principle, I mean to include, first, the narrational and expository practices that undergird Biblical discourse itself, or rather, those practices as identified, abstracted from their original texts, and generalized. For example, the "reticence" that Erich Auerbach identifies as essential to the story of the binding of Isaac, and which he sees as characteristic of Hebrew narrative (and by implication texts and discourses seriously shaped by Hebrew narrative). One might also think of Auerbach's chapter on New Testament narrative with its emphasis on the lack of decorum characteristic of it: that is, the way it fails to match style and subject, at least according to the rules of classical rhetoric.