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The Book of Job from the Old Testament is juxtaposed in detail with its hypertext in Thomas Mann's novel: the chapter where Jacob mourns for his "dead" Joseph. An argument is made that Mann's awareness of rabbinical literature creates a connection with the Akedah tradition, i.e., different ways of dealing with the sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham in Genesis. The notion that Abraham actually does kill Isaac, as suggested by a medieval rabbinical text, is interwoven into the analysis of Jacob's mourning for Joseph who appears as an Issaac-like sacrificial victim in Mann's novel. A connection is established between Abraham, Job and Jacob as figures whose children are claimed by God, and their reactions to this test are compared.
The argument proceeds from the documentary hypothesis in modern biblical studies. This hypothesis is based on the assumption that the 1st 5 books of the Old Testament were written by four different authors at different times. These authors are known as J, P, E and D. Their writing was joined in the 5th c. B.C.E. into what became the Pentateuch and the first part of the Old Testament. The result of this joining was a series of contradictions and redundancies in the final text as we have it today. Readers of the Bible who seek to read it as one coherent text try to naturalize these contradictions by what I call "stitching." Stitching involves putting coherence back into the Pentateuch by accounting for the contradictions and redundancies in terms of plausibility and common logic. Modern authors who write versions of Old Testament stories, such as Thomas Mann in his "Joseph and his brothers", also engage in stitching. I demonstrate how Mann stitches a number of important episodes from the Patriarch saga. I discuss the effect of this process on the story line. I compare that to two other recent instances of biblical stitching in modern fiction. And I conclude with the argument that stitching in modern biblical hypertexts stems from the need for coherence in the modern realistic novel. This post-enlightenment coherence impulse is contrasted with myth and the latter's tolerance for loose ends and less than coherent narrative.
Many critics have pointed out the importance of revelation by John of Patmos as an intertext in Michel Tournier's "Le roi des aulnes" [...]. They normally refer to the apocalyptic ending of the novel as the most obvious link with the Johannine text. This connection is obvious not only because the final scene is the destruction of Kaltenborn castle with all its inhabitants (and by extension the destruction of the entire Third Reich), but also because there are direct references to revelation in Tournier's text [...]. However, the importance of Johannine discourse goes well beyond this overt intertextuality.
This article deals with Michel Tournier as a writer of hypertexts. The first chapter of "Gaspard, Melchior et Balthazar" is considered with respect to two possible unmarked hypotextual connections. The first is a short story by Anatole France entitled "Balthasar", and the song of songs is the key element that connects France's and Tournier's texts. The second is an episode from Genesis which I term "The sister-wife Hoax". The main concern in this study is the issue of human dignity as it relates to race and sexuality.
Sholem Asch's epic novel "Moses" has been criticized for a number of shortcomings. One of the main reproaches has do with Asch's attempt to present myth as history in a serious and at times "stuffily reverential" style (Siegel 194). Leslie Fiedler compares Asch's retelling of Exodus-Deuteronomy to Thomas Mann's version of Genesis in "Joseph and his Brothers" and argues that Asch, unlike Mann, lacks the irony of Mann's approach which is essential for handling mythological material in the modern age. Fiedler maintains that Mann's novel is superior to Asch's because Mann does not try to modernize the original material by rationalizing it (Fiedler 73-4). While there is much truth in what Fiedler says about "Moses", the contrast between Mann and Asch is not quite so clear-cut. Undoubtedly, the two authors did handle their material in radically different ways. However, both authors were writing modern realistic novels, i.e., they were dealing with a genre that demands structural coherence. And in this respect one must not overemphasize the difference between Asch's and Mann's treatment of myth.
Given Tournier's own indication that the story of Taor in the last part of "Gaspard, Mechior & Balthazar" came to him from Edzard Schaper's "Die Legende vom vierten König" and Henry van Dyke's "The story of the other wise man", this article compares the three texts in order to determine their respective theological perspectives. It is argued that Schaper's and van Dyke's respective tales constitute meditations on the sheep and the goats pericope from Matthew 24. Tournier's tale, on the other hand, involves a different theological focus: the first temptation of Christ from Matthew 4:14 as this pericope relates to Deuteronomy 8:2-3. This shift in focus makes food central to the spiritual journey of Tournier's protagonist: the gluttonous Taor makes a symbolic transition from "living on bread alone" to living by "every word that comes out of the mouth of God" (the bread of the Eucharist). It is argued that because Taor begins his journey from the spiritually immature (from a Christian perspective) position of the Israelites in Exodus 16, his starting point is pre-Christological and, therefore, his journey is far greater than those of Schaper's and van Dyke's respective protagonists. The latter possess rudimentary Christological knowledge right from the start and therefore undergo less extensive spiritual metamorphosis than does Taor.
One of the most striking and unsettling elements in Venedikt Erofeev's novel "Moskva-Petuški" is the ending where Venja, the protagonist-narrator, is murdered by four mysterious executioners in the stairway of a downtown Moscow building. [...] The last sentence turns the entire preceding narrative into a paradox: the narrator indicates that he could not have told his story, since he ceased to exist as a consciousness ("soznanie") as soon as the action stopped. The fact of Venja's death itself does not necessarily cancel out his ability to tell about the events leading up to his demise: literature knows a number of beyond-the-grave narrators, e.g., the murdered Olivia in Anne Hebert's "Les fous de Bassan" or the dead samurai Tekehiko in Akutagawa Riunosuke's "In a grove". What makes Venja's narrative paradoxic is his own reference to the end of his cogitative activity. at the moment of death the hero ceases to think and should, logically, lose the ability to narrate. Normally, a dead narrator acquires his/her ability to narrate by supernatural means, e.g., via life after death, as in "Les Fous de Bassan" or through a medium, as in "In a Grove". Such postmortem loquacity may also remain unexplained. In "Moskva-Petuški", however, the dead narrator seems to stress that his death appears as the ultimate end: a point where everything, including time and consciousness, stops.
Ten years after writing "Spotted dog running along the seashore" ("Пегий пес, бегущий краем моря") Chingiz Aitmatov said that this novella was his favorite. Perhaps this is because it represents the essence of Aitmatov's artistic world view. The term "essence" is appropriate here because the setting and the characters of the novella are totally removed from the modem world and from history itself. Unburdened by the need to relate his artistic goals and philosophical interests to any specific socio-political context - a requirement made all the more problematic for an author writing within the Soviet literary system - Aitmatov was free to develop his favorite themes in a kind of "tabula rasa" medium. Thus, it was with absolute directness that the author could face questions dominating much of his fiction: the moral soundness of age-old values, the need for continuity in social development, the necessity of humanity's hannonious coexistence with nature, and the positive ethical value of myth.
In his lifetime Daniil Charms only succeeded in publishing two of his poems for adults. Publicly he was a children's author: a job in the Soviet Union which traditionally attracted many writers whose literature for adults was either rejected by the official literary system or had to be hidden altogether if its creators wanted to avoid trouble.
In fact up to the present day it is still Charms the children's author who is best known and loved, although finally under new historical and political conditions the writer for adults has also been allowed to make his debut. However, whatever he wrote, Charms' work was always dominated by an absurdist world view, a view that usually denied all dogma or ideology. His only aim seems to have been to present a world upside down and play around with literary and other conventions, i.e. more than anything else he wanted to be different, acting as a sort of literary "punk".
Although Charms and his associates were preceded by European absurdist authors, such as A. Jarry (1873-1907), it is very difficult to establish any relationship of influence between examples of Western European absurdism and Daniil Charms. Nonetheless, Charms' work, as well as that of Jarry, Ionesco and Beckett, all share the "grotesquely comic as well as irrational" (Abrams 1981: 1) quality of the absurdist movement in its larger modernist context.