BDSL-Klassifikation: 04.00.00 Allgemeine Literaturgeschichte > 04.03.00 Vergleichende Literaturgeschichte
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This essay deals with two retellings of Genesis: Thomas Mann's "Joseph and his brothers" and Anita Diamant's "The red tent". Both authors note the presence of implicit pagan tendencies among the women of Jacob's clan (Gen 31:19; 35:2) and develop this subtext for their respective ideological purposes. Thomas Mann creates a dichotomy between the backwardness of the pagan female realm and the progressive nature of the monotheistically-oriented patriarchs. The path toward modern humanist values comes from the likes of Jacob and Joseph rather than Rachel and Leah in Mann's novel. Anita Diamant, on the other hand, adopts the opposite attitude, namely, that the paganism of Rachel, Leah, as well as other women in Jacob's family, is a humane and natural form of spirituality in contrast to the bloodthirsty Yahwism of Jacob and his sons. The latter point is illustrated by the sacking of Shechem. In order to question the patriarchal stance of the Old Testament Diamant reverses the key values informing the theology of the Bible. Thus, in "The red tent" Jacob's wives venerate the Ashera in particular. The latter constitutes a challenge to the stance of the Deuteronomic History where the cult of the Ashera is viewed as a key reason behind God's decision to let the Babylonians destroy the Southern Kingdom of Judah. And since Mann's novel upholds the patriarchal spirit of the biblical text, Diamant enters into debate with the continuity of female disempowerment which reaches all the way from Genesis to "Joseph and his brothers".
The world in a 'Zeitschrift'
(2015)
The relaunching of the Jahrbuch 'Komparatistik' in 2015 takes place at a time of ferment in comparative literary studies, as a discipline long focused primarily on Western Europe seeks to reconsider its position in a global landscape, and in the process to rethink the contours of European literature itself. Here I would like to discuss one new manifestation of this rethinking: the founding of the 'Journal of World Literature', which will be debuting in 2016. Published in Amsterdam by Brill, with its managing editors located in Leuven and in Göttingen, the 'JWL' represents a European initiative in comparative and world literary studies, and the journal has a global presence as well. It is overseen by an international board of editors (myself among them), and it has an association with the Institute for World Literature, a Harvard-based program supported by five dozen institutions around the world, which will be responsible for one of its quarterly issues each year. Global in outlook and outreach, the 'JWL' can equally be thought of as carrying on an originally German project: to embody the potentially vast field of comparative and world literature within the pages available in a scholarly journal. To this end, very different approaches were tried in the last quarter of the nineteenth century by two foundational journals: the 'Acta Comparationis Litterarum Universarum', published in Cluj from 1877-88 by the Transylvanian scholars Hugo Meltzl and Sámuel Brassai, and the 'Zeitschrift für vergleichende Litteraturgeschichte', founded in 1886, published in Berlin under the editorship of Max Koch. Probably the very first journals in the field – the French 'Revue de littérature comparée', for example, dates only from 1921 – these pioneering journals divided up the literary territory in very different ways. Meltzl and Brassai’s 'Acta' reflected an idealistic globalism grounded in a radical multilingualism, whereas Koch opted for a more pragmatic but markedly nationalistic conception of the field. The new 'Journal of World Literature' will need to draw on the strengths of each approach even as its editors seek to avoid the pitfalls of both.
The point of my explanation is simply that in its "deep-structure" even 'A Handful of Dust' (and 'a fortiori', as we shall see, other novels by Waugh) attaches itself to the mode of the historical novel, which is only in a very qualified way the descendant of the epic, as Lukacs would have us believe.
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.
This paper is the report of a study conducted by five people – four at Stanford, and one at the University of Wisconsin – which tried to establish whether computer-generated algorithms could "recognize" literary genres. You take 'David Copperfield', run it through a program without any human input – "unsupervised", as the expression goes – and ... can the program figure out whether it's a gothic novel or a 'Bildungsroman'? The answer is, fundamentally, Yes: but a Yes with so many complications that it is necessary to look at the entire process of our study. These are new methods we are using, and with new methods the process is almost as important as the results.
Donald Siegel's 1971 film entitled "The Beguiled" is compared to Tale 1 of Day 3 from Giovanni Boccaccio’s "The Decameron". Both stories are about a man who arrives in a garden setting and finds nine sexually starved women. In Boccaccio's tale, a male gardener finds himself in a convent occupied by nine nuns with whom he proceeds to have sexual relations to everyone's satisfaction. Siegel's film is about a wounded soldier taken in at a girls' finishing school whose nine female residents become the objects of the hero's amorous attention. While Boccaccio adopts a philogynist tone with respect to the material, "The Beguiled" appears to be a virulently misogynist film projecting its female characters as jealous demons who end up mutilating and then killing their male suitor. Findings from evolutionary psychology pertaining to female jealousy and reproductive strategies are used to consider the respective attitudes toward women in the medieval tale and the twentieth-century film. Conclusions are drawn about the difficulty of placing either of the stories within a clear-cut philogynist or misogynist category.
The virgin Mary and Eve constitute two opposite sexual poles in the way Christian discourse has approached women since the time of the church fathers. This stems from a predicament faced by the human male throughout hominid evolution, namely, paternal uncertainty. Because the male is potentially always at risk of unwittingly raising the offspring of another male, two (often complementary) male sexual strategies have evolved to counter this genetic threat: mate guarding and promiscuity. The Virgin Mary is the mythological expression of the mate guarding strategy. Mary is an eternal virgin, symbolically allaying all fear of paternal uncertainty. Mary makes it possible for the male psyche to have its reproductive cake and eat it too: she gives birth (so reproduction takes place) and yet requires no mate guarding effort or jealousy. Eve, the inventor of female sexuality, is repeatedly viewed by the church fathers, e.g., Augustine and Origen, as Mary's opposite. Thus, Eve becomes the embodiment of the whore: both attractive in the context of the promiscuity strategy and repulsive in terms of paternal uncertainty: "Death by Eve, life by Mary" (St. Jerome). The Mary-Eve dichotomy has given a conceptual basis to what is known in psychology as the Madonna-Whore dichotomy: the tendency to categorize women in terms of two polar opposites. This paper will explore the way mythology reflects biology, i.e., human psychological traits that have evolved over millennia.
„Great writers,“ those who constitute our canon (at any given moment, one should add warily, since aesthetic canons fluctuate considerably over time), have invariably been the focus of reception studies, partly because they provide the most fertile ground for research, but partly also because literary scholars (and in particular the aspiring doctoral candidate: I myself graduated with an influence /reception study of this kind) need some justification for their endeavors, and what better ticket into the ivory rower - or onto the book market - than the study of the most seminal and widely accepted authors? James Joyce is just such a „great author.“ And „James Joyce and German Literature,“ the subject of this essay, must inevitably result in some form of reception study. But just what form should it take? Within the limited space of one article, it would be impossible to survey in toto Joyce's influence on German literature; that is, the multiple receptions of Joyce by some four or five generations of authors writing in German.
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.
It is commonplace to assert that the Book of Genesis in the Old Testament is based on an androcentric position. Although critics have tried to introduce some sort of female empowerment by reassessing various biblical stories (cf. Savina Teubal, 1984), Genesis remains a man's realm with only a limited female perspective. The case of Dinah's rape by Shechem in Genesis 34 illustrates the marginality of womanhood in the biblical world and theology. The pericope tells us that, while the Israelites are settled near the Hivite city of Shechem in Canaan, Jacob's and Leah's daughter Dinah goes out of the Israelite camp. She is raped by Shechem, the prince of the eponymous city, who then abducts her and makes her one of his household. A deal is concluded by Jacob's sons and the Shechemites, according to which the situation can be made legitimate through marriage if the men of Shechem circumcise themselves. While the Shechemites are weak at er the surgery, the Israelites sack the city, kill all the males and take Dinah back.