Canonization, Satire, and Criticism of Avot in Midrash Yelammedenu from the Genizah

Zutot ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Eliyahu Rosenfeld
Keyword(s):  
Close Reading ◽  
Initial Impression ◽  
Canonical Status

Abstract In this article, I present a midrashic reference to one mishnah of tractate Avot that would appear to undermine its canonical status. A close reading of the midrash, will show that it makes use of various satirical tools, including exaggeration and ridicule, which appear to be aimed at a mocking of the mishnah. However, further reading of the midrash in light of a more comprehensive look at tractate Avot will show that contrary to this initial impression, the use of satire may not be directed at undermining the canonical status of Avot but rather at strengthening it. According to this reading, the satire is directed at internal criticism that the midrash identifies in the heart of the mishnaic text, with the result that Avot’s status is restored.

Initial Byzantine Reactions to the Arab Conquest

1969 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 139-149 ◽  
Author(s):  
Walter Emil Kaegi
Keyword(s):  
Eighth Century ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
Historical Event ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Initial Impression ◽  
Saint John ◽  
Christian Apologetics

Numerous competent studies have appeared on Christian apologetics—both Byzantine and Western Medieval—against Islam. A significant gap, however, remains. The Byzantines, of course, first encountered Islam because of the Arab conquest in the second and third quarters of the seventh century. Yet the earliest known Byzantine apologist against Islam is Saint John Damascene in the eighth century. But what initial impression did the Arab conquest and Islam make upon seventh-century Byzantine contemporaries? The seventh-century Byzantine sources on Byzantine reactions to the Arab conquest are scarce, inconveniently located, and insufficiently studied. There is no known individual Byzantine tract of the seventh century devoted specifically to the problem of Islam and/or the Arab conquest. But even though seventh-century sources are relatively rare—on any subject—by a close reading of those which are available one can glean some interesting and, in my opinion, important indications concerning Byzantine reactions to the Arab conquest. Obviously such a major historical event as the loss of Egypt, Palestine and Syria would greatly have impressed the Byzantines and would have caused them to ponder its significance.

Stolen from the Snows: John Kinsella as Poet and as Fiction Writer

CounterText ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 232-238
Author(s):  
Nicholas Birns
Keyword(s):  
Close Reading ◽  
Artistic Identity ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
Fiction Writer

This piece explores the fiction of John Kinsella, describing how it both complements and differs from his poetry, and how it speaks to the various aspect of his literary and artistic identity, After delineating several characteristic traits of Kinsella's fictional oeuvre, and providing a close reading of one of Kinsella's Graphology poems to give a sense of his current lyrical praxis, the balance of the essay is devoted to a close analysis of Hotel Impossible, the Kinsella novella included in this issue of CounterText. In Hotel Impossible Kinsella examines the assets and liabilities of cosmopolitanism through the metaphor of the all-inclusive hotel that envelops humanity in its breadth but also constrains through its repressive, generalising conformity. Through the peregrinations of the anti-protagonist Pilgrim, as he works out his relationships with Sister and the Watchmaker, we see how relationships interact with contemporary institutions of power. In a style at once challenging and accessible, Kinsella presents a fractured mirror of our own reality.

‘Nothing is simply one thing’: Woolf, Deleuze and Difference

2013 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 456-474
Author(s):  
Beatrice Monaco
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Prose Poetry ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Similar Model ◽  
Complex Interplay ◽  
To The Lighthouse

This paper explores some key texts of Virginia Woolf in the context of Deleuzian concepts. Using a close reading style, it shows how the prose poetry in Mrs Dalloway engages a complex interplay of repetition and difference, resulting in a remarkably similar model of the three syntheses of time as Deleuze understands them. It subsequently explores Woolf's technical processes in a key passage from To the Lighthouse, showing how the prose-poetic technique systematically undoes the structures of logical fact and rationality inscribed in both language and everyday speech to an extremely precise level.

Resonance in Dhvani Aesthetics and the Deleuzian Logic of Sensation

2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-44
Author(s):  
Srajana Kaikini
Keyword(s):  
Art History ◽  
Visual Art ◽  
Normative Theory ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Literary Interpretation ◽  
Sanskrit Poetics ◽  
Comparative Framework ◽  
Time Image

This paper undertakes an intersectional reading of visual art through theories of literary interpretation in Sanskrit poetics in close reading with Deleuze's notions of sensation. The concept of Dhvani – the Indian theory of suggestion which can be translated as resonance, as explored in the Rasa – Dhvani aesthetics offers key insights into understanding the mode in which sensation as discussed by Deleuze operates throughout his reflections on Francis Bacon's and Cézanne's works. The paper constructs a comparative framework to review modern and classical art history, mainly in the medium of painting, through an understanding of the concept of Dhvani, and charts a course of reinterpreting and examining possible points of concurrence and departure with respect to the Deleuzian logic of sensation and his notions of time-image and perception. The author thereby aims to move art interpretation's paradigm towards a non-linguistic sensory paradigm of experience. The focus of the paper is to break the moulds of normative theory-making which guide ideal conditions of ‘understanding art’ and look into alternative modes of experiencing the ‘vocabulary’ of art through trans-disciplinary intersections, in this case the disciplines being those of visual art, literature and phenomenology.

On the Primacy of Matter: Neoplatonism Right-Side Up

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tyler Tritten
Keyword(s):  
Close Reading ◽  
After Effect ◽  
The One

This chapter provides a close reading of Schelling’s early commentary on Plato’s Timaeus and then contrasts this reading with Neoplatonism’s, particularly Proclus’, understanding of this same text. While Neoplatonism views being according to a hierarchy of degradation or descent, with matter at the bottom, Schelling affirms that being potentiates itself into higher and greater degrees of order such that matter is not the last but the first. He is able to do this, however, only by rejecting the Platonic notion of participation. For Schelling, the participating acquires an independence from the participated so that an effect can be greater than its cause and, moreover, the effect exerts a retroactive after effect on the cause. The identity of a cause or antecedent is only constituted in and through its consequents. If matter is said to process from the One, then matter, in turn, is the consequent condition of the identity of the One as one rather than as many.

Transformation and Education in GDR Youth Literature: A Script Theory Approach

2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-82
Author(s):  
Jean E. Conacher
Keyword(s):  
Fairy Tale ◽  
Democratic Republic ◽  
Socialist Realism ◽  
National Literature ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Theory Approach ◽  
Conceptual Blending ◽  
Script Theory ◽  
Cultural Policies ◽  
Youth Literature

Youth literature within the German Democratic Republic (GDR) officially enjoyed equal status with adult literature, with authors often writing for both audiences. Such parity of esteem pre-supposed that youth literature would also adopt the cultural–political frameworks designed to nurture the establishment of socialism on German soil. In their quest to forge a legitimate national literature capable of transforming the population, politicians and writers drew repeatedly upon the cultural heritage of Weimar classicism and the Bildungsroman, Humboldtian educational traditions and Soviet-inspired models of socialist realism. Adopting a script theory approach inspired by Jean Matter Mandler, this article explores how directive cultural policies lead to the emergence of multiple scripts which inform the nature and narrative of individual works. Three broad ideological scripts within GDR youth literature are identified which underpin four distinct narrative scripts employed by individual writers to support, challenge and ultimately subvert the primacy of the Bildungsroman genre. A close reading of works by Strittmatter, Pludra, Görlich, Tetzner and Saalmann reveals further how conceptual blending with classical and fairy-tale scripts is exploited to legitimise and at times mask critique of transformation and education inside and outside the classroom and to offer young protagonists a voice often denied their readers.

Patrick Kavanagh and the Authentic ‘Dispensation’: Rereading the Role of Narrator in The Great Hunger

2012 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 86-104 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine Kilcoyne
Keyword(s):  
National Literature ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Peasant Farmer ◽  
Nineteen Forties ◽  
Death Knell

This essay posits a challenge to the continued reading of The Great Hunger (1942) as a realist depiction of the Irish small-farming class in the nineteen forties. The widespread critical acceptance of the poem as a socio-historical ‘documentary’ both relies upon and propagates an outmoded notion of authenticity based upon the implicit fallacy that Kavanagh's body of work designates a quintessence of Irishness in contradistinction to his Revivalist predecessors. In 1959 Kavanagh referred to this delusion as constituting his ‘dispensation’, for indeed it did provide a poetic niche for the young poet. Kavanagh's acknowledgement of this dispensation came with his rejection of all prescriptive literary symbols. While this iconoclasm is widely recognised in his later career, the relevance of The Great Hunger to this question continues to be overlooked. In fact, this poem contains his strongest dialectic upon the use of symbols – such as the peasant farmer – in designating an authentic national literature. The close reading of The Great Hunger offered here explores the poem's central deconstruction of ruralism and authenticity. The final ‘apocalypse of clay’ is the poem's collapse under the stress of its own deconstructed symbolism; the final scream sounds the death knell to Kavanagh's adherence to his authentic dispensation.

The Triumph of Olemaun: Survivance, Empathic Unsettlement, and Restorying the History of Canadian Residential Schools

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 132-146
Author(s):  
Anah-Jayne Markland
Keyword(s):  
Residential Schools ◽  
Truth And Reconciliation Commission ◽  
Aboriginal Peoples ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Reconciliation Commission ◽  
Mandatory Education ◽  
Truth And Reconciliation ◽  
Young Readers ◽  
History Of ◽  
Age Appropriate

The ignorance of many Canadians regarding residential schools and their traumatic legacy is emphasised in the reports of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) as a foundational obstacle to achieving reconciliation. Many of the TRC's calls to action involve education that dispels and corrects this ignorance, and the commission demands ‘age-appropriate curriculum on residential schools, Treaties, and Aboriginal peoples' historical and contemporary contributions to Canada’ to be made ‘a mandatory education requirement for Kindergarten to Grade Twelve students’ (Calls to Action 62.i). How to incorporate the history of residential schools in kindergarten and early elementary curricula has been much discussed, and one tool gaining traction is Indigenous-authored picturebooks about Canadian residential schools. This article conducts a close reading of Margaret Pokiak-Fenton and Christy Jordan-Fenton's picturebook When I Was Eight (2013). The picturebook gathers Indigenous and settler children together to contest master settler narratives regarding the history of residential schools. Using Gerald Vizenor's concept of ‘survivance’ and Dominick LaCapra's notion of ‘empathic unsettlement’, the article argues that picturebooks work to unsettle young readers empathetically as part of restorying settler myths about residential schools and implicating young readers in the work of reconciliation.

Outlaws and Misfits: The Identities of Modernist Criticism

2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 337-356
Author(s):  
Ben Knights
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Industrial Capitalism ◽  
Emotional Maturity ◽  
English Departments ◽  
Emotional Autonomy ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Implicit Identity ◽  
The University ◽  
Cultural Positioning

The images of the writer as exile and outlaw were central to modernism's cultural positioning. As the Scrutiny circle's ‘literary criticism’ became the dominant way of reading in the University English departments and then in the grammar-schools, it took over these outsider images as models for the apprentice-critic. English pedagogy offered students not only an approach to texts, but an implicit identity and affective stance, which combined alert resistance to the pervasive effects of mechanised society with a rhetoric of emotional ‘maturity’, belied by a chilly judgementalism and gender anxiety. In exchanges over the close reading of intransigent, difficult texts, criticism's seminars sought a stimulus to develop the emotional autonomy of its participants against the ‘stock response’ promulgated by industrial capitalism. But refusal to reflect on its own method meant such pedagogy remained unconscious of the imitative pressures that its own reading was placing on its participants.

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