A Glossary of New Testament Narrative Criticism with Illustrations

James Resseguie

doi:10.3390/rel10030217

Abstract

This is the first stand-alone glossary of New Testament narrative-critical terms in the English language. It is an alphabetical listing of prominent terms, concepts, and techniques of narrative criticism with illustrations and cross-references. Commonly used terms are defined and illustrated, these include character, characterization, double entendre, misunderstanding, implied author, implied reader, irony, narrator, point of view, plot, rhetoric, and other constitutive elements of a narrative. Lesser-known terms and concepts are also defined, such as carnivalesque, composite character, defamiliarization, fabula, syuzhet, hybrid character, MacGuffin, masterplot, primacy/recency effect, and type-scene. Major disciplines—for example, narratology, New Criticism, and reader-response criticism—are explained with glances at prominent literary critics/theorists, such as Aristotle, Mikhail Bakhtin, Wayne Booth, Seymour Chatman, Stanley Fish, E. M. Forster, Gérard Genette, Wolfgang Iser, and Susan Sniader Lanser.

Highlights

Narrative criticism focuses on how the New Testament works as literature
Narrative critics are concerned primarily with the literariness of New Testament narratives or the qualities that make them literature. It is a shift away from traditional historical-critical methods to how the text communicates meaning as a self-contained unit, an undivided whole
It has examined the politics of the first century world (Horsley 2001; Carter 2004) and the social world of the New Testament (Rhoads 2004), applied feminist criticism to narrative criticism (Anderson 1983; Malbon 1983), incorporated the insights of reader-response criticism to narrative criticism (Powell 2001; Powell 2011; Resseguie 2016), and applied cognitive narratology to New Testament narrative criticism (Hongisto 2010; Green 2016; see Herman 2013). This is the first stand-alone glossary of New Testament narrative-critical terms in the English language. It is an alphabetical listing of prominent terms, concepts, and techniques of narrative criticism with illustrations and cross-references

Summary

Introduction

Narrative criticism focuses on how the New Testament works as literature. The “what” of a narrative (content) and the “how” (rhetoric and structure) are analyzed as a complete tapestry, an organic whole. It attends to the constitutive features of narratives, such as characterization, setting, plot, literary devices, point of view, narrator, implied author, and implied reader. In 1982, David Rhoads and Donald Michie analyzed Mark from a narrative-critical perspective, focusing on the narrator, point of view, literary technique, setting, plot, and character (Rhoads and Michie 1982).

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