Biblical Archetypes Research Articles

WAR EXPERIENCE AND ITS REFLECTION IN GEORGES BERNANOS’ POLITICAL WRITING AND NOVELS

The article analyzes the reflection of the 20th century’s war experiences both in fictional writing and political pamphlet of Georges Bernanos, a representative of the Catholic Literary Revival movement in French interwar literature. A chronological classification of the entire writer’s heritage connected with the subject of war is offered and divided into three periods. The most representative texts are proposed for each. Further research attention is devoted to the early period, namely the experience of the First World War, in which the author participated as combatant, and the problems of the first novel «Under the Sun of Satan» (1926). The novel, which does not directly talk about the war in its plot, is nevertheless classified as warlike. Metaphysical evil and the deterioration of the human soul are regarded as the main ideological constants through the images of the two protagonists of the novel. Emphasis is made on the animalistic image of evil rooted in the biblical tradition and the creation of the image of saint is, according to Bernanos, the only answer to the triumph of evil, which he saw with his own eyes during the war. The explicit manifestation of the Civil War in Spain 1936-1939, witnessed by the author, reinforced by the eschatology and prophetic nature of the narrative, as well as the use of biblical archetypes to denote the nature of violence, is analyzed on the base of the political pamphlet «The Great Cemeteries under the Moon» (1938). It is this war that becomes a turning point in the biography of Bernanos, who as a right-wing nationalist and Catholic discovers for himself the illogical impossibility of supporting the Franco regime, because of the terror. This very problem of mass violence and the propensity of human nature to evil were analyzed using the theory of mimetic violence by the French anthropologist R. Girard.

Relocating a Sacred Space: From Mount Zion to the New Jerusalem in the Mystic Poetry of Rastafari

Biblical scriptures, holy chants and prayers, stories of conquest and destruction, pilgrimages and diaspora narratives have provided a range of perspectives related to the city of Jerusalem. Different cultures and faiths have interpreted its symbolic value and claimed belonging, conquest, ownership, and possession. Amongst these are the Rastafari, members of a spiritual movement that originated in Jamaica, who claim Davidic roots and aim for repatriation to their Promised Land, the New Jerusalem. In their vision, the sacred space of the city of Jerusalem has been relocated to Ethiopia, the land where the Ark of the Covenant has been supposedly moved to, along with the throne of Solomon. The scope of this article is to contextualise how the dynamics of Rastafari mystical poetry have redefined a physical and metaphysical space and the significance of this space as expressed through the biblical archetype of Zion/Jerusalem. The contribution focuses on the comparative textual analysis of multimedia repertoires related to the symbolic and geographical (re)location of the sacred space of Zion/Jerusalem, highlighting how the interpretation of sacred texts and historical events has impacted the spiritual geography and cross-cultural Rastafari iconography at a global level.

BIBLICAL INTERTEXT IN W. SHAKESPEARE’S TRAGEDY “KING LEAR” AND PECULIARITIES OF ITS REPRODUCTION IN THE UKRAINIAN TRANSLATION BY PANTELEIMON KULISH

The article examines W.Shakespeare’s use of biblical allusions in the tragedy “King Lear” and peculiarities of their reproduction in the Ukrainian translation by P. Kulish. Such concepts as “allusion”, “bibleism” and “bibleme” are considered herein, as well as the specifi c features of their reproduction. It was established that the adequate reproduction of the biblical allusions of the source text was facilitated by translator’s thorough knowledge of the Holy Scriptures, as far as P. Kulish translated into Ukrainian “Pentateuch”, “Job”, Psalter, Gospel (co-authored with I. Puliui) and carried out the fi rst complete Ukrainian translation of the Bible (in co-authorship with I. Puliui and I. Nechui-Levytskyi). It was found that in some places properly reproduced biblemes were replaced during the editing process, which led to the loss of intertextuality. It has been clarifi ed that the source text contains the following implicit biblemes: the story of Job, intertexts of the Fall and fratricide, images of the Apocalypse and the suff erings of Jesus. It is established that the use of biblical allusions creates in the text the biblical archetypes of Christ, Job, the Devil, Cain and Abel, which is properly refl ected in the translation. It has been revealed that the translator’s ability to recognize a biblical allusion in the source text depends on the appropriate cognitive base that the translator has, as well as on the recipient’s linguistic and cultural competence which will enable proper interpretation. The possibility to recognize the proposed equivalent in the translated text, if we are talking about an allusion to a certain literary work, depends on the presence in the host culture of a translation of the text referred to by the original author and the reader’s level of familiarity with the denotations of the allusion. The conclusion has been drawn that when trying to fi nd an appropriate equivalent, it is important for the translator not to deprive the reader of the pleasure of decoding hidden meanings, that is, not to resort to overinterpretation in the explanation of the allusion. Key words: Shakespeare, “King Lear”, translation, intertextuality, biblical allusion, bibleme.

A Biblical Archetypal Study on Moby Dick

Moby Dick, one of Herman Melville’s masterpieces, has received tremendous concern for its profound and multiple symbolic and metaphoric meanings. And the pervasive biblical terms and allusions deserve particular attention. This paper, based on Frye's archetypal theory, studies Moby Dick from the perspective of biblical archetypal criticism. The association between the characters and their biblical archetypes helps to reproduce the ancient matrix of The Bible, such as the crime of human beings, themes of sin, the fall, and redemption. The exploration of the biblical archetypal theme in Moby Dick provides us a new perspective to understand the profound significance of the novel. Melville reveals the opposition between good and evil in human beings and shows his contradictory religious outlook as well as his spiritual reflections of his time.

S. Lem as a literary theorist: an existentialist underneath the mask of a structuralist

The article examines the concept of the literary work essence, theoretically developed by S. Lem in his book The Philosophy of Chance. It shows the principles of his criticism of the structuralism approach, and also it compares S. Lems theory of the work with the concepts of R. Barthes and U. Eco. The fundamental characteristic of S. Lems approach here is that his understanding of the work polysemy and its multiple interpretations does not contradict the existence of best interpretation. According to S. Lem, the basic principle of the work understanding is the investigation of its deep ontological model, that is bringing chaos to the order structure. At the same time, the order is of procedural and intersubjective nature. S. Lem adopts the classical principle of searching the work best interpretation so that it should be the result of the selection and synthesis of several variants. Furthermore, S. Lem employs the archetype of the Word creating the world, that builds up the reality. Thereby, S. Lems thinking continues to be determined by biblical archetypes, despite all his external scientism. Such way of thinking is still a valuable pattern for us, since it allows us to combine the analysis of the latest phenomena and situations in culture with understanding of its deep archetypical foundations.

Deconstructing the Female Antagonist of the Coronation Scandal in B’s Vita Dunstani

ABSTRACT The clerical author known as B provides the earliest account of one of pre-Conquest England’s more infamous tales: the coronation scandal of 955. In his Vita S. Dunstani, written 995 × 1005, B recounts that King Eadwig (955–959) absconded from his coronation feast, later to be found by Dunstan, the Abbot of Glastonbury, engaging in a sexual liaison with two women, a mother and daughter. Dunstan’s forcible separation of Eadwig from the two women is presented as the genesis for a feud that plays out between Dunstan and the older of the two women, Æthelgifu. Where much previous analysis of this episode has focused on the saint, Dunstan, and the king, Eadwig, this article seeks to centre Æthelgifu as the primary antagonist of the story. In so doing, it undertakes a detailed examination of her character construct, considering the political situation, intertextual models and biblical archetypes that inform it.

Theme and Performance in Symphony No 5 by Philip Glass

Of Philip Glass's twelve symphonies - perhaps the most popular minimalist composer after John Cage – it is the choral Fifth, entitled "Requiem, Bardo, Nirmanakaya", composed in the years of full maturity (the first performance took place in 1994), that mostly impresses through its grand design, display of instruments and human voices, soloists and four choral ensembles may be considered a version of the theocratic scenario that projects the history of mankind in the order of the divine, characteristic of the premodern age. Glass's originality consists in the overlapping of several mythical structures - Swedish, biblical, Buddhist, Islamic, Sufi, etc. - in accordance with the holistic epistemology of the contemporary era. Despite the Buddhist references in the title, the narrative is modelled on the biblical archetype, from the genesis of the universe to the Last Judgment and it ends with the vision of a future humanity bonded in brotherhood, peace and compassion

On Analysis of the Archetype Images of the Water in As I Lay Dying

<em>As I Lay Dying</em>, written by William Faulkner who has been accepted as one of the representative writers in the American literature history, is a novel in which the biblical archetypes are widely used. Among those biblical archetypes of images, “water” is the most impressive one and by using it, Faulkner expressed his confidence that humanity can overcome all the hardships and evils.

Cultural phenomenon of the rhizome concept

The article examines the manifestations of the rhizome concept proposed by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in human narratives, using elements of the postmodern methodology with clarification of terminology tools. The research is carried out by the method of analysis and deconstruction of some cultural archetypes from the standpoint of relevance to the studied concept. The application of these methods to biblical archetypes, which have long influenced the way of thinking of mankind, will allow to analyze the ontological elements of individual ideological constructs, which are the base for the principles of liberal and conservative ideologies. The research is applied to the values called traditional but formed mainly in the XIX century, and their true relation to the deep cultural tradition of the Abrahamic religions. The analysis allows to identify the manipulation of elements of certain cultural and philosophical trends and assess their prospects, including the possible impact on global transformation processes in human culture.

BIBLICAL ARCHETYPES IN WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE’S TRAGEDY “KING LEAR” AS THE IMPLICIT REFERENCE TO THE HOLY SCRIPTURE: VERBALIZATION AND PECULIARITIES OF REPRODUCTION

The article presents the Translation Studies analysis of William Shakespeare’s tragedy “King Lear” and its fi ve Ukrainian translations done by Panteleimon Kulish, Panas Myrnyi, Maksym Rylskyi, Vasyl Barka and Oleksandr Hriaznov. The attempt has been made to outline the Biblical archetypes in the source text and to trace the level of their reproduction in the Ukrainian target texts. On the basis of the research conducted, it has been assumed that by means of various allusions and themes parallel to the Biblical ones, the reader of the tragedy encounters the Biblical archetypes of the Christ, Job, Devil, Cain and Abel. The author of the article also scrutinizes how these archetypes are actualized in the text in question through various verbal images and examines the level of their reproduction in the target texts. Key words: Shakespeare, “King Lear”, translation, biblical archetypes, Bible, allusion.

ПОЭТИКА ЦИКЛА НОВОГОДНИХ СТИХОВ М. В. ИСАКОВСКОГО (СРАВНИТЕЛЬНО-ТИПОЛОГИЧЕСКИЙ АСПЕКТ)

Six New Year (eonic) poems by M. V. Isakovsky, written between 1942 and 1972, are examined in the article as a non-author's cycle with its own ‘plot’. It captured such philosophical phenomena as death, guilt, suffering, chance, etc., which revealed themselves in a sacred moment of time — the New Year. The three “battlefield” toasts reflected Isakovsky's sense of guilt before himself and the people; the desire to cast a spell on hostile forces and thus bring victory closer. The humorous post-war toast of 1948 demonstrated the return of life in the USSR to a peaceful track, which was signified by the restoration of state and family holidays, dinner parties. The official ‘newspaper’ toast “for 1958” expresses the idea of “new happiness” that emphasizes the motive of peaceful labor exploits of the Soviet people, while the poems “for 1973” can be classified as confessional. Isakovsky's New Year poems are also analyzed in the context of two traditions — Russian aeonic poetry and ritual toasts. Connections with poems by V. A. Zhukovsky, P. A. Vyazemsky, M. I. Tsvetaeva, A. T. Tvardovsky are traced. New Year poetic toast, on the one hand, became one of the many genres that contributed to the unity of the Russian people in the face of mortal danger during the war; on the other hand, it preserved a number of archaic topoi (the experience of the New Year’s transition as a sacred time; ritual magic formulas that invoke Death, Time and Fate; the biblical archetype of the chosen people, etc.).

The Character of the Treacherous Woman in the Passiones of Early Medieval English Royal Martyrs

Early medieval England is well-known for its assortment of royal saints; figures who, though drawn from nearly five centuries of pre-Conquest Christianity, are often best known from eleventh-century hagiography. Common among these narratives is the figure of the “wicked queen”–a woman whose exercise of political power provides the impetus for the martyrdom of the royal saint. Flatly drawn and lacking in complex motivation, the treacherous woman of English hagiography is a trope, a didactic exemplar tailored to eleventh-century English audiences, and a caution of the dangers of female agency. Here biblical archetypes, clerical scholarship, and an inherent social misogyny unite in a common literary framework. Yet it is also true that each of these “wicked queens” has a unique transmission history that displays a complicated progression of the motif within a living narrative. This article examines the role of the treacherous woman as a narrative device in three royal hagiographies: <em>Passio S. Æthelberhti</em>, <em>Vita et miracula S. Kenelmi</em>, and <em>Passio S. Eadwardi regis et martyris</em>. In so doing, it explores the authorial motives and social influences that informed the composition of these figures, arguing that each is formed of a convergence of the historical and regional contexts of the saints’ cults with the political concerns and ecclesiastical anxieties of the tenth and eleventh centuries.

»Se voues nous volés oïr et entendre, nous vos mosterrons par droite raison […] que vostre lois est noiens«

The encounter between Francis of Assisi and sultan Malik al-Kamil in 1219 became in its immediate aftermath object of several historiographic, hagiographic and literary accounts. One can see that a common, yet variously developed element of all these reports is the record of the future saint surprising his audience by the frankness of his preaching of the Christian faith. This continuity stretches from the Old French Chronique d’Ernoul, which firstly introduced this aspect, to Dante’s Commedia. Actually, in the light of the eye-witness account of Thomas of Split, an enthusiastic speech of Francis at the Egyptian court could well respond to the facts: following the model of the contemporary political concionatori and their biblical archetype, Salomon, Francis surely preached in a simple but theologically profound way the Truth of Christian relevation, trusting that Divine wisdom in humility is superior to an approach which is grounded exclusively in human knowledge.

Baudelaire et la sacralité de la poésie. Par John E. Jackson

In this lucid and persuasive essay, John E. Jackson, with the aid of close analysis of some of the most familiar poems of Les Fleurs du Mal together with others less commonly scrutinized, presents a mature reflexion on a perceived interplay between religion, myth, and word (parole), a triad that is seen to lead to Baudelaire’s sacralization of poetry. His discussion is divided into two closely related parts of unequal length, the first carefully entitled ‘Les Religions de Baudelaire’, and the second ‘De la parole dans Les Fleurs du Mal ’. Short shrift is given to Marcel Ruff’s non-theological discussion of ‘le mal baudelairien’, to Lloyd James Austin’s conviction that for the poet ‘le mal’ equated to Chateaubriand’s mal du siècle, and to the interpretations of ‘le mal’ advanced by representative scholars of a Marxist (or marxisant) persuasion. Instead, and with good reason, Jackson insists that it is from the starting point of key notions of Catholic doctrine that Baudelaire seeks to give expression to his troubled metaphysical state, while succeeding in transcending the pathological only through the unique form of satisfaction offered by poetic creation. It follows that Baudelairean metaphysics cannot be accessed in terms of explicit statements of religious belief but only through engagement with the poems themselves, which by their very nature defy conventional paraphrase. By his own admission, Jackson is the avowed enemy of over-interpretation. His subtle readings reveal the poems to be dictated by Baudelaire’s instinctive, if not always immediately apparent, commitment to self-contradiction, a phenomenon exemplified, for example, by ambiguous shifts of personal pronoun that betray uncertainty with regard to his identification with figures both addressed and treated as subjects. Such seemingly insignificant words as ‘enfin’, ‘encore’, or ‘parfois’ can likewise become singularly disruptive. In response to the complexity of the poetic voice (and its polyphonic splintering), Jackson’s analyses themselves are consistently tentative, employing the conditional mood, redefinition, and qualifiers (including regular recourse to ‘si l’on peut dire’). Paradox and (radical) ellipsis are duly central to his enterprise. Although the author is beyond doubt theologically literate, his fundamental concern is at no stage with calculating the extent (or limits) of Baudelaire’s Christian orthodoxy as such, just as he is quick to point out the essential irrelevance of designating certain of the poet’s utterances as blasphemous. It is, as his suggestive title indicates, the entirety of Baudelaire’s poetic universe that is in play here rather than an artificially circumscribed dimension. At the same time, this study makes patently clear that the poet’s sacralization of poetry is all the more powerful for drawing explicitly on religious and biblical archetypes. Even so, Jackson’s exemplary close readings of a strikingly varied range of poems have the undoubted potential to serve as models for analyses of further Baudelaire poems conducted independently of his overarching thesis. His essay also contains valuable observations for students of Mallarmé and (particularly) Nerval, as well as for those with a scholarly interest in ekphrasis.

Chaos in Babel: Reconfiguring Biblical Archetypes in Monique Bosco's Babel-Opéra

Monique Bosco was a prolific author of numerous novels, short stories, and poems, and was recognized as one of the key Jewish writers in Montreal, a small minority group of immigrant intellectuals who wrote in French.... In many of Bosco’s works, readers can observe a particular fascination with the ancient past, especially a preoccupation with the Old Testament and such biblical archetypes as Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Moses, Miriam, Job, and Lot’s wife. However, Bosco deviates from the traditional representation of these biblical figures, as she revises them to reflect the contemporary crisis of exile and geographical displacement—seminal elements associated with the Jewish Diaspora.

O Chronicon Conimbricense e o arquétipo bíblico de realeza sagrada no Portugal do século XII

O Chronicon Conimbricense e o arquétipo bíblico de realeza sagrada no Portugal do século XII

Elie Wiesel and the Biblical Archetypes of the Contemporary Middle East

AbstractThis article focuses on two newspaper advertisements written by Holocaust survivor and author Elie Wiesel, which were published shortly before his death in 2016. These controversial advertisements, appearing in the US and the UK, addressed recent tensions in the Middle East, referencing the books of 2Kings and Esther. The article explores Wiesel’s relationship to contemporary politics, traditions of biblical interpretation, and ideas of sacred temporality. I argue that these advertisements present a vivid case study of the potential difficulties posed by framing contemporary conflicts via biblical archetypes. Specifically, I suggest that they challenge us to develop an awareness of instances in which biblical reception can mythologize suffering by subsuming novel and complex events into premeditated narratives.

Have You Considered My Servant Job? Understanding the Biblical Archetype of Patience by Samuel E. Balentine

<i>Have You Considered My Servant Job? Understanding the Biblical Archetype of Patience</i> by Samuel E. Balentine

Have You Considered My Servant Job? Understanding the Biblical Archetype of Patience by Samuel E. Balentine

Have You Considered My Servant Job? Understanding the Biblical Archetype of Patience by <i>Samuel E. Balentine</i>

Have you considered my servant Job?: understanding the biblical archetype of patience

Have you considered my servant Job?: understanding the biblical archetype of patience