Allegorical Approach Research Articles

ADVENTURES IN TIMELAND

ABSTRACTOne of the more significant issues to have emerged from the discourse surrounding the Anthropocene has concerned the apparent incommensurability of human and natural history and the vastly different timescales involved. More generally, such discourse raises critical questions about the very different way time is conceptualized in the natural sciences as opposed to in the social sciences and humanities. In this article, I draw on my own disciplinary background in archaeology in order to contribute to these differences and build bridges between the two disciplinary domains by foregrounding the materiality of time. I use a partly allegorical approach inspired by Edwin Abbott's nineteenth‐century novel Flatland to investigate a notion of three‐dimensional of time, which I compare with Gilles Deleuze's three temporal syntheses. The article argues for the concept of Thick Time, which emphasizes the importance of time as constituted by things, whereby things make time rather than exist within it. A material time is one that foregrounds time as a mode of transmission, a “passing on,” and of the persistence of the past in the present.

Осмысление исторического процесса в богословском наследии Оригена Александрийского

Introduction. Origen of Alexandria is a large Christian thinker who worked in line with the philosophy of Platonism, Neoplatonism and the emerging Christian tradition. He is a significant figure, both in Christian theology and in the history of philosophy, who especially strongly influenced the medieval period of the development of philosophical thought. Although the theologian did not leave an integral historical concept, he constantly addressed the problem of history in his numerous works. A special feature of Origen’s theological ideas about history is the combination of literal and allegorical approaches to it. Theoretical analysis. The author attempts to recreate a holistic picture of Origen’s ideas about the world-historical process on the basis of preserved works. The providential action of God in history is described. The central role of the Divine Logos – Christ is highlighted. Origen’s eschatology is considered separately as the doctrine of the end of world history. The role of the doctrine of universal salvation as the restoration of the original world order and the meaning of the entire world historical process is revealed. Conclusion. The author concludes that human history, according to Origen, is a part of the world cosmological process and the reflection of it on the Earth. It is the result of a global catastrophe and should contribute to the restoration of the original order.

Review: Sirens of Modernity: World Cinema via Bombay, by Samhita Sunya

Book Review| June 01 2023 Review: Sirens of Modernity: World Cinema via Bombay, by Samhita Sunya Sirens of Modernity: World Cinema via Bombay, by Samhita Sunya Swapna Gopinath Swapna Gopinath SWAPNA GOPINATH is an associate professor of film and cultural studies at Symbiosis Institute of Media and Communication, Pune. She is a Fulbright fellow and is a coeditor of Historicizing Myths in Contemporary India (Routledge), a book on popular Hindi cinema. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar BOOK DATA Samhita Sunya, Sirens of Modernity: World Cinema via Bombay. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2022. $34.95 paper. 270 pages. Film Quarterly (2023) 76 (4): 106–107. https://doi.org/10.1525/fq.2023.76.4.106 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Swapna Gopinath; Review: Sirens of Modernity: World Cinema via Bombay, by Samhita Sunya. Film Quarterly 1 June 2023; 76 (4): 106–107. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/fq.2023.76.4.106 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentFilm Quarterly Search BOOK DATA Samhita Sunya, Sirens of Modernity: World Cinema via Bombay. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2022. $34.95 paper. 270 pages. In her new book Sirens of Modernity: World Cinema via Bombay, Samhita Sunya examines “public debates over gender, excess, cinephilia and the world via Bombay … over a ‘long’ 1960s period” (4). A fitting addition to the Cinema Cultures in Contact series, Sunya’s book considers the role of popular Hindi cinema in the nation’s embrace of modernity, but moves away from national allegorical approaches to explore the transnational visibility and circulation of popular Hindi films of the 1960s. More provocatively, Sunya’s case studies are not purely Bombay productions; rather, they are transnational coproductions or remakes of Madras productions, thereby enabling the reader to see beyond the hegemonic patterns of production and reception of Bombay cinema. This well-researched work lies at the intersections of film studies and... You do not currently have access to this content.

Martin Luther and the Rule of Faith: Reading God's Word for God's People by Todd R. Hains

Reviewed by: Martin Luther and the Rule of Faith: Reading God's Word for God's People by Todd R. Hains Mark Mattes Martin Luther and the Rule of Faith: Reading God's Word for God's People. By Todd R. Hains. Downers Grove, Illinois: IVP Academic, 2022. xx + 217 pp. With respect to hermeneutics, Luther is often seen as having freed interpreters from medieval allegorizing because he favored a literal approach to scripture. Likewise, he is thought to have liberated interpreters of scripture from accountability to the wider catholic tradition and instead allowed them an autonomous voice. Hains challenges such misrepresentations by focusing on a neglected aspect of the reformer's thinking: the analogy or rule of faith. For Luther, the analogy of faith offers a way to find a legitimate place for the allegorical interpretation of scripture. According to Hains, the analogy of faith, referred to in Romans 12:6, was seen prior to the Enlightenment as the core apostolic teaching of the church, but, after the Enlightenment, "the vast majority of exegetes" have interpreted it "in the subjective sense," as the faculty of faith "exercised by the individual" (13). Indeed, Enlightenment hermeneutics rejected the analogy of faith seen as apostolic teaching because, from the start, the allegorizing it employs to interpret scripture assumes the traditional creedal affirmations of faith to which it wishes to arrive. Its strategy was to replace the analogy of faith with the historical critical method (17). In contrast, for Luther, when interpreting scripture, nothing is as central for faith as Christ. Luther's hermeneutic cannot be reduced to formulas like "justification by grace alone" since Luther read scripture through a thoroughly trinitarian lens and justification should not be understood apart from union with Christ (6). Luther appealed to the catechism, which includes the Ten Commandments, the Apostles' Creed, the Lord's Prayer, and the sacraments, as what constitutes the analogy of faith, since those matters [End Page 216] unfailingly leads us to Christ (19). Here, "catechism" should not be reduced either to Luther's Small or Large Catechisms. The concept has a wider focus. It is the "animating logic" of Luther's theology as a whole (24). The Small and Large Catechisms are commentaries on "catechism" understood in a broader sense (34). Drawn from the scriptures, the analogy of faith functions, as I interpret Hains, as a "canon within the canon," a legitimate move precisely because it leads to Christ. With this analogy of faith, Hains demonstrates that Luther employed a rich allegorical approach to scripture provided that attempts at allegorizing agree with the analogy of faith. Allegory elaborates and explains faith. It is a matter of rhetoric and not dialectic (8) and while it should not be employed as the basis for doctrine, it can expand on the application of doctrine. For Luther, the Bible can be divided into five sections: the law, history, wisdom, prophets, and the New Testament. Hains selects representative passages from each of these biblical sections (Genesis 22, Judges 14, Psalm 72, Isaiah 9:2–7, and Luke 24:13–14) in order to illustrate how Luther employed the analogy of faith. Hermeneutics informed by the analogy of faith entails interpreting passages not merely in relation to each other, a "general analogy," but instead by putting the catechism in conversation with anything in the Bible, a "special analogy" (29). Again, the key is that the catechism ever witnesses to Jesus Christ as the Lord of scripture (29). For example, to properly interpret the sacrifice of Isaac, which comes across as God commanding Abraham to violate the prohibition against murder, Hains notes that grammar, history, and the literary context alone fail to ascertain the meaning of the passage. Instead, an interpreter needs the help of the second article of the creed which details the sacrificial life of Christ (88). Isaac, as Luther saw it, is properly understood as a figure of Christ (89). Hains concludes that the analogy of faith allows interpreters to read the Bible on the basis of the Bible, since the catechism in all its parts is thoroughly biblical and that it promotes faith since it ever witnesses to Christ. Hains builds on an angle in...

The Posthuman and Transboundary Imagination in Contemporary Korean Literature: Considering the Works of Pae Myŏnghun and Yun Ihyŏng

Abstract Literature limited to the eyes of “humanity” as created by humanism is insufficient to explore the conditions faced in the twenty-first century. The posthuman forms prevalent in contemporary South Korean literature, such as cyborgs, humanoids, and artificial intelligence, go beyond reflecting scientific developments; they operate as critical, political rhetoric with regard to discourses of modernity. This article focuses on the posthuman forms and also future time and space in Pae Myŏnghun’s and Yun Ihyŏng’s short stories in relation to critical posthumanism. Although Pae’s allegorical approach may seem somewhat simplistic, the posthuman forms that are brought to life in his works are highly innovative and effectively criticize modern systems. In contrast to Pae, Yun uses the futuristic subject to concentrate on humans, through narratives of coexistence where nonsynchronism is in operation. Yun’s narratives focus on a performative posthuman discourse that traverses gender, age, and class-based dualisms. With hybrid, multilayered, and performative identities and the transgression of boundaries, the two writers undermine the modern notion of linear, progressing time and cast doubt on notions of objectivity or totalized knowledge, urging a rethinking of the “here and now.”

Beyond Shakespeare's land of ire: Revisiting Ireland in English Renaissance drama

AbstractThere has been much critical work on the symbolic centrality of Ireland to English Renaissance literature and drama. To focus on the latter, Shakespeare's histories have been read topically in terms of the contemporaneous Irish wars and also more historically, in terms of English colonialism in Ireland. Topical readings have been followed by allegorical approaches with, for instance, attention to Othello's “ghostly Irish subtext” (Hadfield, ) or Troilus and Cressida's memories of Elizabethan conflict in Ireland (Parker, ). Such interpretations suggest scholarly imaginativeness, the discovery of surprising meaning about a text we thought we knew, albeit within a Shakespeare‐centric frame. They further suggest the capacity of Ireland to enter a play's imaginary—as problem, as image, as other world. At stake here, then, are interrelated questions about what Ireland is doing in English Renaissance drama, where and when we expect to find it, and how we read it. This essay re‐examines the question of why and how Ireland features in plays by Shakespeare and other early modern dramatists. This deceptively simple question is intended to revisit some assumptions that underpin current critical understandings. Why Ireland features in plays has been largely understood as a function of historical contexts and processes: critics and scholars have turned to these as an important site of explanation, with the early modern colonialist discourse on Ireland given special prominence as a determinant of meaning. However, this focus has sidelined other considerations. This article argues for a broadening of context, beyond a focus on topical resonance, to allow for a consideration of dramatic genre and form, the imitative nature of dramatic writing, and the theatre companies themselves, as important factors that shaped how a text and context like Ireland and the Irish found its way into a play. This approach treats representations as a series of reciprocal markings, intertextual echoes, and foregrounds the capacity of a play to make meaning within its own frame. The objective here is less about discounting the political and ideological work of Renaissance plays than about exploring their possibilities to (re)imagine the early modern “land of ire.”

Mythical allegories of fear (a psychoanalytic aspect)

Myths of all nations filled with images of scary creatures. Historians of religion, ethnologists, experts myths explain them differently, mainly when they come together in mind that all together they certify man's fear of the gods. But this does not explain the fact that a wide variety of creepy creatures, each intricate mythology is inexhaustible and inexplicably ugly. It is proposed to take a look at the most famous monsters of Greek mythology in aspect of psychoanalytic combined with allegorical approach, since it is an allegory includes powerful resource codification mental states. Fears rights embodied in the mythical monsters and populate the world. Tree-headed Cerberus (later three-headed dragon in fairy tales) and Medusa Gorgon is the brightest in Greek mythology, allegory fear of death. Fears rights embodied in the mythical monsters and populate the world. Three-headed Cerberus (later three-headed dragon in fairy tales) and Medusa Gorgon is the brightest in Greek mythology, allegory fear of death. Fear of death is the fear of the underworld in the image of Cerberus, he exposed the relative control and can even be overcome. The horror of death which suddenly embraces man and kills her in the image of Medusa Gorgon. Allegory of the fear of death and horror of death - various images that cause different themes. Complex movements of the inner life of people have learned to understand and analyze only the new time, but even in mythical times of mankind were put into allegorical codes that are interpreted each time differently.

Kritik Terhadap Epistemologi Fikih Murtad.

This paper contains a critique to fiqh of apostasy which considers the action as a criminal offense to be sentenced to death. Reviewing the legal sources of fiqh using allegorical approach and historical evidence indicates that the action is a violation of the theological apostasy against God, and therefore only God who has a right to punish. In al-Qur’an, the type of punishment is non-physical punishment and will be executed in hereafter. The act of apostasy will be punishable by death if apostasy is in political arena and civil matter, which is followed by resistance and rebellion against legitimate political authority that interfere with public safety and official authority. Therefore, the provision of the punishment is handed over to the legitimate political institutions (ta’zir) to determine the appropriate punishment.DOI: 10.15408/ajis.v16i1.2895

Medieval Crossover: Reading the Secular against the Sacred. Barbara Newman. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013. Pp. xvi+399.

<i>Medieval Crossover: Reading the Secular against the Sacred</i>. Barbara Newman. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013. Pp. xvi+399.

The Revolution Will be Uploaded: Vernacular Video and the Arab Spring

The vernacular online videos produced by the Arab revolutions constitute an un-precedented (though not unproblematic) historical resource for understanding the subjective experience of the ordinary people who find themselves on the front line of revolutionary struggle. But they also effect a sea-change in the way in which we view and understand YouTube itself. This article argues that the political significance of these videos lies less in their explicit content, than in their aesthetics - that is, in the new formal and sensory propositions that they constitute, the ways in which they “redistribute the sensible” (Rancière). The prologue proposes, following Judith Butler, that “the people” who are the subject of history are essentially a performative event, rather than a pre-existing entity, and that to write about revolution therefore requires a performative and allegorical approach. The first section reviews the current academic notion of “vernacular video” in the light of Ivan Illich’s work of the early 1980s on vernacular language and values, and argues that a stronger, more political conception of the vernacular is necessary to do justice to these works. The second section offers a close reading of one particular video from the Libyan uprising, and argues that it offers less an example, than an allegory of the dialogical relationship between the individual and the collective that defines the moral economy of the vernacular. The article concludes by proposing that the right response to such videos is not (just) more theory or criticism, but rather to seek to emulate their radically egalitarian forms of practice.

Sexual politics in the narratives of E.T.A. Hoffmann

This article argues that contrary to late-eighteenth, and early-nineteenth, century sexual politics and contemporary literary practice, the work of E.T.A. Hoffman (1776–1822) subverts the accepted polarization of the sexes. This is shown in the choice and treatment of character and plot in Hoffmann's works of prose fiction, and in how he employs tone and narratorial voice. Drawing on a wide selection from Hoffmann's stories, some examined in detail, we show how his writing permits widely differing critical readings. We use Booker's theories to support our contention that Hoffmann's approach to gender is non-conformist. We also extend the critical arguments of Mattli, Bronfen, and Schmidt, and counter-argue against those of Hadlock, Asche, and Von Matt with regard to confined, comatose, and dead or dying women. We show that, in critiquing Romantic discourses on the muse, Hoffmann's work gives a voice to marginalized women, and lampoons bigoted men. We use a combination of historical, literary, allegorical, and folkloric critical approaches to support our argument that Hoffmann's fictional writing destabilizes a strict demarcation of gender; we thereby defend him against imputations of misogyny.

Transforming Relations: Essays on Jews and Christians Throughout History in Honor of Michael A. Signer (review)

Reviewed by: Transforming Relations: Essays on Jews and Christians Throughout History in Honor of Michael A. Signer Zev Garber Transforming Relations: Essays on Jews and Christians Throughout History in Honor of Michael A. Signer, edited by Franklin T. Harkins. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010. 476 pp. $50.00. Transforming Relations is a collection of insightful essays that speak on the interaction between Jews and Christians in antiquity, the medieval period, and the modern era. It honors the important work of Michael A. Signer, the Adams Professor of Jewish Thought and Culture at the University of Notre Dame from 1992 until his death in 2009. The chapters treat various aspects of the Jewish-Christian relationship through the centuries, including the centrality of and departure from scriptural law in antiquity, reflections on Christianity in the Talmud and Midrashim, medieval Christian hermeneutics and Hebraism, and the appreciation of Judaism in modern Christianity. The essays focus on issues that permeate Signer's own scholarly work, namely, that shared scriptural texts and commentary serve simultaneously as a point of convergence and divergence for Jews and Christians, and that meaningful contemporary interfaith Jewish-Christian dialogue recognizes similarity and difference by participants who draw from separate but equal streams of monotheistic traditions. To honor the memory and work of Michael Signer, editor Franklin T. Harkins has assembled a cadre of friends and colleagues, admirers all of the honoree and his contribution to scholarship. The book's front matter contains [End Page 162] a dedicatory poem in memory of Michael by Cyril O'Regan, a foreword by John van Engen, and an introduction by Franklin T. Harkins on Signer's study of historical Jewish-Christian exegesis. The volume is divided in two parts. Essays in Part One ("Ancient and Medieval Perspectives: Exegesis, Polemic, and Cultural Exchange") begin with Arnold Band's personal reminiscence of the professor-student relationship and the seeds of textual methodology planted at UCLA in the early 1960s. David Novak focuses on the centrality of Torah from Sinai and its historical role in the parting of the ways and dialogical healing between Pharasaic Judaism and Pauline Christianity; and Israel Jacob Yuval speaks of the merits of "parallelmania," not polemics and apologetics, when early Christian texts mix with rabbinic literature. The next essays deal with personalities and schools of Jewish and Christian exegetes and teaching in twelfth-century northern France. Grover A. Zinn discusses the multiple ways that Psalms affected the spiritual life and theological education affecting the canons of the Parisian Abbey of St. Peter. By dissecting the theoretical framework of Hugh of St. Victor, Dale Coulter shows interpretive similarities (plain meaning, history connected to narratives affixed to events, word and syntax interpretation) between Victorines and their Jewish counterparts. Likewise, Boyd Taylor Coolman and Franklin T. Harkins engage in similar activity in researching Hugh's students, Richard of St. Victor and Andrew of St. Victor, respectively. All three chapters reflect pivotal texts that exemplify borrowing, polemics, and advancement. Deborah L. Goodwin contrasts the literal and allegorical approaches of Rabbi Samuel ben Meir (Rashbam) and Peter Comestor in reading the narrative of Rebekah's children, Esau and Jacob (Gen 25-27) Rashbam's commentaries on Lamentations and the Song of Songs is the focus of Sara Yapet's chapter. E. Ann Matte elaborates on the overlapping eschatological layers of the Wandering Jew in medieval Christianity (killers of the Lord, testifiers to his Second Coming and fulfilled in ecclesiastical conversion). Leslie Smith concludes that the Postilla in totem bibliam (commentary on the whole Bible) is the collaborate scholarship of the Dominican master and administrator Hugh of St. Cher's and Mendicant scholars. Arjo Vanderjagt posits that the mastery of Hebrew by Wessel Gansfort (1419-1489) was not for dialogue but for the conversion of Jews and to enhance piety and devotion by Christians to Jesus. Finally, Jeremy Cohen probes a story narrated by Solomon ibn Verga in his Shevet Yehudah that speaks of the nefarious charge of blood libel in sixteenth-century Spain and Portugal; the price to overcome was separation in body, space, and Jewish-Chritian scholarly encounter. Part Two presents a variety of ways that Jews and Christians encounter and entangle in...

Real Money and Romanticism by Matthew Rowlinson

Matthew Rowlinson. Real Money and Romanticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Pp. xi+249. $89.00. An Coleridge famously remarked in Statesman's Manual, but a translation of abstract notions into a picture-language, which is itself nothing but an abstraction from objects of senses; principal being more worthless even than its phantom proxy, both alike unsubstantial, and former shapeless to boot. Following Coleridge, critics have often denigrated allegory, reading literature in philosophical or historical contexts symbolically, in Coleridge's terms, partak[ing] of reality which it renders intelligible; and while it enunciates whole ... as a riving part in that unity of which it is representative. To be sure, critics appreciate fact that, in practice, symbolic analysis is itself highly figurative, even allegorical. As Frye noted in The Anatomy of Criticism, the instant that any critic permits himself to make a genuine comment about a poem (e.g., 'In Hamlet Shakespeare appears to be portraying tragedy of irresolution') he has begun to allegorize. In 1970s, Paul de Man showed that criticism undermines its symbolic pretensions by revealing its allegorical dimensions in moments of rhetorical self-consciousness. New-historicism demonstrated how literary works resist their own historicization by making history itself appear as allegory. Still, such acknowledgments are rare. We tend to assume--symbolically--that Keats's poems or Austen's novels tell us about capitalism or interiority or secularism rather than admit that such associations come from us. Real Money and Romanticism takes an overtly allegorical approach to its historical subject: Romanticism's relation to financial history. For a long time, suspension of cash payments at Bank of England, which made Britain a paper economy from 1797 to 1821, warranted little more than a few footnotes in Romantic studies. The last few years have seen several articles on subject and three books: Robert Mitchell's Sympathy and State in Romantic Era (Routledge, 2007), Mary Poovey's Genres of Credit Economy (Chicago, 2008), and now Rowlinson's. But whereas Mitchell and Poovey read both literature and economics historically, that is symbolically, as illustrations of an overarching historical narrative, Rowlinson is interested in what historical method leaves behind, its waste, curious relationality or allegories that exist between forms of value: and literature and connections between them. Rowlinson takes as his starting point Marx's dictum that money is a social relation. Money exists as difference between values of commodities in exchange. It comes into being when that relation is reified in a system of price or credit, and when commodities disappear persists in a symbolic or sublime form. This story has been told since before Greeks. Yet, following recent work in anthropology and sociology, as well as a panoply of critical theorists from Freud and Mauss to Derrida and Zizek, Rowlinson turns this story inside out: monetary objects (coins, bills, records, accounts, books) survive their conversion into and retain traces of social relations that form abandons. Thus, when a check is endorsed, it can pass as from one recipient to another. But in retaining form of a written contract, endorsed check retains traces of original exchange and its status as is exposed as a further relation dependent on it. Rowlinson calls these surviving monetary objects curiosities; while he does not cite recent important work by Ina Ferris, Katie Trumpener, and Susan Manning, there is much in Rowlinson's argument that will, I think, attract anyone interested in theoretical implications of Romantic antiquarianism. To this already difficult theoretical argument Rowlinson adds an equally controversial historical one. …

When the real matters: interpreting the visual with Catherine Belsey

Focusing on Catherine Belsey's interest in understanding the intimate link of visual perception with the Lacanian real, this article traces the evolution of her interpretation of visual art from her initial allegorical approach to visual language to her engagement with contemporary art. So doing, it also focuses on the way contemporary art dislocates and defamiliarises the gaze. Turning to artists who also feature in Culture and the Real – especially Rachel Whiteread – and taking the question of representation as its central focus, it also returns to Lacan's seminal dialogue with Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology in order to cast light on what may be defined as the dead angles of Belsey's analysis of the visual. Desire and loss are seen to be caught in an endless dialectics which is that of the spectator's experience when faced with works whose purpose is both to discomfort and to tantalise. Working with our physical experience of loss, with the mechanics of memory and desire, these works both inscribe and deny satisfaction. When confronted with such visual and experiential riddle, one may find it enlightening to return to Catherine Belsey's poetics of the real and her defence of an open textual practice that acknowledges both the foreclusion of desire and its compelling energy.

Theodoret of Cyrus: The Questions on the Octateuch. By Robert C. Hill

2 volumes. Volume 1 On Genesis and Exodus. Volume 2 On Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges and Ruth. Greek text revised by John F. Petruccione. English translation with introduction and commentary. Pp. volume 1 civ , 352 , volume 2 xxxii, 432 , Library of Early Christianity 1 and 2 , Washington D.C. , The Catholic University of America Press , 2007 , vol. 1 £25.50 , vol. 2 £21.50 . With these two volumes, the Library of Early Christianity has, at long last, been born. The waiting has been worthwhile. The publishers, The Catholic University of America, intend to publish one new volume approximately every other year. The Library will consist of texts in the original language, Arabic, Armenian, Coptic, Ethiopic, Georgian, Greek, Latin, or Syriac, with English translations on facing pages. Each volume will include an introduction, notes and a bibliography. If the editorial board can match the quality of these first volumes with those that come after, we shall owe another great debt of gratitude to the CUA Press. Such an undertaking is so often nowadays a matter of team work and this one has worked diligently under the directorship of David McGonagle, Director of the CUA Press, and John Petruccione, Editorial Director of the LEC. Amongst others, Natalio Fernández Marcos (whose edition of the Questions was published in Madrid in 1979) has addressed issues around errata, variant readings and issues of punctuation, in addition to the contents and lacunae of individual manuscripts. Françoise Petit has worked on passages erroneously attributed to Theodoret by the Catena Nikephori. William McCarthy and Eustratios Papaioannou have assisted on matters of Greek usage and Dr McCarthy has provided some useful bibliographical suggestions. Robert Caldwell has helped with textual variants, points of translation and punctuation. Much of the indexing work has been carried out by Brent Gilbert. Susan Barnes, as editorial assistant, has aided in the achievement of a admirably clear and consistent text and translation. Volume one opens with a comprehensive introduction to Theodoret's life and works, introduction to the Greek Text, bibliography and conspectus siglorum. The texts are supported by comments on the original Greek and contextualising notes that make the translation more accessible to the non-specialist. The second volume repeats the bibliography and conspectus and ends with a superb index scripturisticus, general index and index of modern authors. Little has come down to us from this controversial fifth-century bishop from Antioch and far less, of course, is in English translation (we think of his anti-Monophysite dialogues, the Eranistes, his Ecclesiastical History and Religious History and various Commentaries). His exegetical works present a traditional typological interpretation of the Bible, manifestly ‘correcting’ both Origen's allegorical approach and Theodore of Mopsuestia's literalism. The choice of his Questions, then, is a bold one yet, together with his commentaries on Kings and Chronicles, Psalms, Song of Solomon, and the Major and Minor Prophets, they are amongst the finest examples of the Antiochene School. In sum, we have been served well by the CUA Press, not least in making Theodoret a little better known to his modern day audience.

Praise Seeking Understanding: Reading the Psalms with Augustine (review)

Reviewed by: Praise Seeking Understanding: Reading the Psalms with Augustine David Vincent Meconi S.J. Jason Byassee. Praise Seeking Understanding: Reading the Psalms with Augustine. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2007 Pp. xiv + 290. $32 (paper). The most extensive of all of Augustine’s works is his Enarrationes in Psalmos, which spans almost more than double in length than any other single treatise. It also took him the longest time to produce, from 392 up through 418. Carefully crafting and preaching his way through all 150 psalms, Augustine focused on the songs of David because therein “we see Christ, there we understand Christ” (cf. en. Ps. 44.16; 96.2; 98.1). Only recently, however, have students of Augustine come to appreciate the intricate and sophisticated methodology and hermeneutic running throughout this commentary. Sr. Maria Boulding has produced the most recent English translation in six volumes and excellent works by such scholars as James Babcock (The Christ of the Exchange: A Study in the Christology of Augustine’s Enarrationes in Psalmos; University Microfilms [1972]) and Michael Fiedrowicz (Psalmus vox totius Christi: Studien zu Augustinus “Enarrationes in Psalmos” [1997]) have rightly treated the Christology holding together Augustine’s much-beloved Psalter. Jason Byassee is the assistant editor of The Christian Century and his recent Praise Seeking Understanding serves as a volume in Eerdmans’s Radical Traditions series, which proposes a renewed appreciation and application of “scriptural faith in contemporary life.” Divided into five main chapters, Byassee shows Augustine’s allegorical approach to scripture in general and also the beautiful treatment this yields in the psalms in particular. Byassee opens by appraising the present-day scholars who have in some way dealt with Augustinian allegory: Stephen Fowl and David Dawson, David Steinmetz, Nicholas Lash, Andrew Louth, Lewis Ayres, and Robert Wilken. Against the unhistorical and myopic approach to the living word of God as found in the historical-critical method, Byassee enlists such bright lights of Christian creedal orthodoxy to show that allegory has a place not only in the heart of the ecclesia but in the mind of the academy as well. “It (i.e., allegory) cannot be dreamed up by a scholar in a carrel, nor understood by someone outside of the reading practices that make it intelligible. It has to be taught, over the course of years, by one expert to another, as part of the growth in grace intrinsic to Christian living” (53), and this is precisely what Byassee’s monograph sets out to do. Chapter Two, “Christology and Exegesis,” reveals how Augustine’s purpose for elucidating the Psalms is ultimately transformative and Byassee does an excellent job in showing how a kenosis-theosis strategy runs throughout the macrostructure of the Enarrationes. That is, the Christ typologically revealed throughout the praise of Israel became human so humans could become godly, and within such “great exchange” language, Byassee accordingly spends much time on analyzing the essential themes of such an admirabile commercium, the dynamics of the Christus totus, and other aspects of what he nicely calls the “theotic movement” throughout the commentaries. Chapter Three turns to “Beauty and Exegesis” and acts as the justification on why those who engage the psalms are [End Page 160] be deified: the Son is the absolute forma Dei, the beauty of the Father and the Spirit and in becoming human, he aims to draw all humans back into the same Trinitarian life. Echoing previous work by Carol Harrison and Michael Hanby, Byassee argues that the human soul “is only rightly related to God and others when infused with caritas, which is, for Augustine, the very love between the Father and the Son that is the Holy Spirit” (104) and thus continues this theme of the centrality of deification by maintaining that the reader of scripture is not only drawn to the beauty of the inner-Trinitarian life but is only fully human when filled with such divine life. Given the obvious source of the scriptural passages in question, it is only fitting that Byassee take up the question of how the actual people of Israel are represented in Augustine’s exegesis of their own writings. In “Allegory and the Jews” Byassee proves perhaps overly...

The Story of Abraham and Models of Human Identity

AbstractThis paper explores the profiles of the women characters Sarah and Hagar as models of human identity. The two characters can only be explored through reading the over-arching narrative of the story of Abraham. Their profiles and narrated personalities have to be extracted from that narrative, but there is a two-sided nature of this necessity. If Sarah and Hagar cannot be separated from the biblical narrator's engagement with father Abraham, neither can Abraham function as father of the nations except through his interaction with these two women. The reader is thus led towards an understanding of how the stories of Genesis 12–24 deal with the issue of parenthood.The body of the paper consists in a close reading of the biblical material following a method of reading which is rooted in the use of imagination as an exegetical tool – a style adopted by Paul in his allegorical approach to Sarah and Hagar in Galatians 4. This approach opens into narrative criticism with a focus on characterisation and on the interactions of Sarah, Hagar and Abraham, caught up in a Domestic Comedy. The women's characters are explored through the themes of parenthood as other, the other woman and woman as other. A final section explores some of the points of narrative ethics to be extracted from the close textual readings of the paper, with reference to the writings of Paul Ricoeur and Emmanuel Levinas. It is suggested that female as well as male characters may offer fruitful models for human identity.

Richard III: An Arab Tragedy (review)

Richard III: An Arab Tragedy Presented by Culture Project (Kuwait) and Sulayman Al-Bassam Theatre at Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon. February 8-17, 2007. Adapted and directed by Sulayman Al-Bassam. Arabic translation by Mehdi Al-Sayigh. Producer Georgina Van Welie. Designer George Tomlinson. Lighting design by Richard Williamson. Costume design by Abdulla Al Awadi. Original music and sound design by Lewis Gibson. With Carole Abboud (Queen Elizabeth), Nicolas Daniel (Minister of State Hastings), Monadhil Daood (Catesby, King Edward IV), Christopher Harvey (General Richmond), Raymond Hosni (Palace Advisor Buckingham), Nadine Joma'a (Lady Anne, Mistress Shore), Fayez Kazak (Emir Gloucester), Areal Omran (Queen Margaret), and others. Richard III lends itself to topical adaptations. Its implacable villain announces his villainy from opening scene: what better bogeyman could a historical moralist desire? Thus Richard has served as a figure of political invective for propagandists since Milton; more recently he has come to wear the imagery of twentieth-century fascist dictator. (See M. G. Aune, The Uses of Richard III: From Robert Cecil to Richard Nixon, in SB 24:3.) Offshoots and productions such as Brecht's Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (1941) and 1990s play and film starring Ian McKellen have used Nazi parallels, whether to expose banality of evil or to induce a near-historical there-but-for-the-grace-of-God frisson. So accepted is allegorical approach that modern-dress productions lacking a coherent political frame risk looking somehow ad hoc. (This was my impression of Michael Boyd's 2007 RSC production, despite Jonathan Slinger's arachnid charisma as Richard. Why black shirts? What exactly were Richmond's kaffiyeh and Kalashnikov meant to tell us?) Into midst of these audience expectations strode Sulayman al-Bassam, a fearless 35-year-old playwright/director commissioned to produce RSC's first-ever Arabic-language play. Included in Complete Works Festival, Richard III: An Arab Tragedy was billed as a response to main RSC production. It was an inspired commission. Kuwaiti-British Al-Bassam oversaw a new Arabic translation of Shakespeare's text and assembled a gifted pan-Arab cast. He worked with costume designer Abdulla Al Awadi to reproduce (and parody) a variety of regional fashions, dressing Queen Elizabeth (Carole Abboud) in Qatar-esque sophisticated hijab and punctuating Lady Anne (Nadine Joma'a) with a pink handbag in shape of a poodle. He recruited Kuwaiti musicians to perform a powerful score that drew on a range of Gulf Arab musical styles, offset with eerie post-modern compositions by Lewis Gibson. And, as he had done in his earlier Shakespeare adaptation, Al-Hamlet Summit (staged in English in 2002 and in Arabic since 2004), Al-Bassam sought out contemporary Arab and Muslim correlatives for Shakespeare's treatment of rhetoric, religion, family, and politics. However, Al-Bassam's take on Richard III went a step deeper than allegory. Tickets were originally sold under title Baghdad Richard, but Al-Bassam wisely decided against producing an adaptation centered on Saddam Hussein. Instead Richard III: An Arab Tragedy used Shakespeare's play to orient Western viewers to some traits of Gulf Arab culture and politics. It also commented (pessimistically, I thought) on chances that such an orientation could somehow make sense of violence and suffering in region. In fact, by showing how very tokens of cultural exchange (traditional costumes, music, prayers, food rituals, rhetorical tropes, etc.) were cynically theatricalized and exploited by those in power, production undercut its own ethnographic lessons even as it imparted them. Gulf Arab context occasioned some smart transpositions. Gloucester wooed Lady Anne from under a woman's abaya (loose black cloak) at an all-female mourning session. …

O poeta da vida moderna

A visão de modernidade de Baudelaire é encontrada por Walter Benjamin na ótica do procedimento crítico alegórico: a mortificação da obra literária. É pela reciprocidade alegórica entre o poeta e o crítico que se evidenciam as mais ricas implicações dessa visão, que, para Benjamin, não está nos ensaios estéticos mas em Les Fleurs du Mal. Michel Foucault, reconhecendo o caráter alegórico da literatura contemporânea depois de Mallarmé, ignora a obra de Baudelaire. Não assumindo a contrapartida alegórica na sua própria leitura, Foucault perde, nos limites da arqueologia dos anos 1960, a mais rica expressão da modernidade em Baudelaire. Quando, posteriormente, reconhece a importância da concepção de modernidade do poeta, restringe-se a considerar os ensaios estéticos, aqueles que, na opinião de Benjamin, constituem o "ponto mais fraco" desta visão.

Out of History: Postwar Art in Beirut

Beirut has a tight hold on the Western imagination: a multilingual and cross-cultural Mediterranean port, a liberal haven in the region, and a hotbed for political violence. Such popular characterizations rest on the city's reputation as a site of both cosmopolitanism and volatile instability. The end of the Lebanese civil war (1975-90) coincided with the art market's global turn, and contemporary postwar artistic production in Beirut carries a similar cachet in me international art world.1 In particular, curators and critics have focused their attention on a group of friends, colleagues, and sometimes collaborators—often tagged as the postwar generation—whose mixed-media practices converge on a critical interest in the war, its histories and memories. Intimately contextual, this work also resonates on an international scale. Its archival aesthetics link the strategies of the postwar generation with global neoconceptual projects, and the works' allegorical approach to history engages with postmodernism's theoretical disillusion with grand narratives. However, for the most part, critics have securely localized this body of work, reading it as symptomatic of postwar Beirut. This essay contends that these artistic strategies both intervene in representations of the city and partake in its history of cosmopolitanism.