Canonical Narrative Research Articles

Humans in the Image of God and Other Things Genesis Does Not Make Clear

Abstract This paper explores the nature and function of the opening chapters of Genesis by way of a focused case study concerning the hermeneutical function of "image of God" language in its canonical setting in Genesis. It pursues a canonically oriented argument that the book of Genesis uses the language of "the image of God" as a relatively under-determined place-holder for something that can only be more clearly defined by seeing how the canonical narrative develops, beyond Genesis, and indeed beyond the OT. The discussion will look first at hermeneutical frameworks for reading the image of God and second at how the language functions canonically as a part of Gen 1–11. A third section explores briefly other substantive issues in Gen 1–11 that might best be understood in this canonical perspective.

Humans in the Image of God and Other Things Genesis Does Not Make Clear

Abstract This paper explores the nature and function of the opening chapters of Genesis by way of a focused case study concerning the hermeneutical function of "image of God" language in its canonical setting in Genesis. It pursues a canonically oriented argument that the book of Genesis uses the language of "the image of God" as a relatively under-determined place-holder for something that can only be more clearly defined by seeing how the canonical narrative develops, beyond Genesis, and indeed beyond the OT. The discussion will look first at hermeneutical frameworks for reading the image of God and second at how the language functions canonically as a part of Gen 1–11. A third section explores briefly other substantive issues in Gen 1–11 that might best be understood in this canonical perspective.

The rise and fall of gay: A cultural-historical approach to gay identity development

Research on identity development has paid relatively little attention to the development of marginalised identities such as those of gays and lesbians, whose isolation from the canonical narrative of sexuality may limit the available resources required for establishing a coherent identity. We examined these contested identities in relation to cultural-historical factors that may have played a role in shaping these identities over the past 50 years, and looked at how such factors have impacted the voicing and silencing of gay experiences. Participants (N=251) reported (1) a memory of a cultural event relevant to their sexuality, and (2) a self-defining memory about their sexuality. Those in older cohorts reported cultural memories centred on politics and other external events (e.g., Stonewall riots), and younger cohorts reported more personal memories (e.g., coming out), suggesting that homosexual identities have become less culturally defined, and instead more personally defined. Further, participants of older cohorts reported self-defining events that were predominantly from one private domain (e.g., sex). In contrast, younger participants reported a variety of self-defining events. These results suggest that cultural-historical factors play an important role in defining the developmental pathway of individuals, perhaps especially those who have marginalised identities.

Using narrative methods in crosscultural research with Mongolian and Australian women survivors of domestic violence

My feminist, narrative research privileges women’s voice. It comprises a cross‐cultural narrative analysis of 11 Mongolian and 11 Australian women’s stories of survival, recovery and remaking of self following domestic/intimate partner violence. With a major focus on narrative identity, I identified plots and themes of individual autobiographical narratives, as well as relevant canonical narratives (general stories of lives arising from dominant discourses in a particular culture). From these elements I created a meta‐narrative which constitutes the body of the research report. The strength of this narrative research method was to elicit narratives of women’s journeys through and beyond domestic violence. The research process involved myself as researcher, as well as participants themselves, bearing witness to and reflecting on the women’s stories. Particularly empowering for participants was hearing and responding to their own stories and the sharing of stories among participants. In this article I give an overview of my theoretical approaches and research methods, tell the story of conducting the research and give a brief summary of my findings and conclusions.

Law and Literature as Survivor

While human rights lawyers from Nuremberg on tried to respond to the evils of Hitler's Europe with cautious directness, humanistic theorists in the post-modernist modes of the post-war period resisted all generalizations, including the establishment of legal norms through international codes of law. Addressing with some admiration the Holocaust-related later works of Geoffrey H. Hartman and (with less reverence) the anti-code and largely antinomian writings of Paul de Man and Jacques Derrida, this essay places in opposition the code-identifying and code-evaluating work of Law and Literature to that of the always equivocated writings of these deconstructionists for whom every grand narrative and every attempt to base act and choice on precedent was anathema. Although Hartman's aversion to all generalization is ethically sound considering the damage caused by Hitler's blunt and conclusory rhetoric, this essay relies on work about legal discourse during the Holocaust to indicate that this aversion emerges from a mis-placed logic about how institutions managed to adjust their ingrained beliefs and practices to such grotesque pronouncements. More skeptical perhaps of complexity for its own sake, Law and Literature studies tend to locate codes (public or private, written or unwritten) within the great stories of the law and then unabashedly to value those codes in the Nietzschean sense as good or bad, justice-serving or reactionary. Discourse confronts ethical dilemmas - including those still unresolved six decades after the Holocaust - and to speak of them through a direct language of choice that often informs the canonical narratives we study.

Patriarch Methodius, the Author of the Lost First Life of Theodore of Stoudios

Through his hagiographical writings, Patriarch Methodius of Constantinople played a crucial role in shaping the canonical narrative of the iconophile resistance during the first half of the 9th century. This article makes the case that Methodius not only wrote the Lives of the confessors Theophanes of Sigriane and Euthymius of Sardes, he was also the author of the now lost first Life of Theodore of Stoudios, which then served as the model for the extant Vita B by the Studite monk Michael.

Narrative as construction and discursive resource

Discursive psychologists (Edley, 2001; Potter & Wetherell, 1987; Wetherell, 1998) have analysed identity work in talk, including the ways in which understandings which prevail in a wider social context are taken up or resisted as speakers position themselves and are positioned by others. In these terms, a narrative is generally understood in two ways. The first is as an established understanding of sequence or consequence, such as a potential life trajectory, which becomes a discursive resource for speakers to draw on (cf. Bruner’s ‘canonical narratives’, 1991). The second is of a narrative as a situated construction, such as the biography produced by a speaker within a particular interaction. In this article, I propose an expanded analytic focus which considers how the versions of a biographical narrative produced in previous tellings become resources for future talk, thus setting constraints on a reflexive speaker’s work to construct a coherent identity across separate interactions and contexts (Taylor & Littleton, forthcoming).

Biographies in talk: A narrative-discursive research approach

This paper demonstrates the contribution a synthetic narrativediscursive approach can make to understanding biographical work within a research interview. Our focus is on biographical work as part of the ongoing, interactive process through which identities are taken up. This is of particular interest for people who, for example, are entering a new career and can be seen as “novices” in the sense that they are constructing and claiming a new identity. Following a discussion of the theoretical and methodological background in narrative, discourse analytic and discursive work in social psychology (e.g. Bruner, 1990; Edley, 2001; Potter and Wetherell, 1987; Wetherell, 1998), the paper presents an analysis of biographical talk from an interview study with postgraduate Art and Design students. Our interest is in their identity work, including biographical work, as novices in their fields. The analysis illustrates the approach and the key analytic concepts of, first, shared discursive resources, such as interpretative repertoires (e.g. Edley, 2001) and canonical narratives (e.g. Bruner, 1991), and, secondly, troubled identities (e.g. Wetherell and Edley, 1998; Taylor, 2005a) . It shows how speakers’ biographical accounts are shaped and constrained by the meanings which prevail within the larger society. For our participants, these include established understandings of the nature and origins of an artistic or creative identity, and the biographical trajectory associated with it. The particular focus of our approach is on how, in a speaker’s reflexive work to construct a biographical narrative, the versions produced in previous tellings become a constraint and a source of continuity.

The Virgin Mary in the Ministry of Jesus and the Early Church according to the Earliest Life of the Virgin

In 1986, Michel van Esbroeck published a remarkable new Life of the Virgin that not only is among the most profound and eloquent Mariological writings of early Byzantium but also presents a useful compendium of early apocryphal traditions about Mary. Some of the Life's episodes are already well known from their original sources, such as the Protevangelium of James and the early dormition apocrypha, but many other extrabiblical traditions appearing in this Life of the Virgin are not otherwise attested in early Christian literature. This is true especially of the section that overlaps with the gospels, where the Life expands the canonical narratives in ways unprecedented (to my knowledge) in Christian apocryphal literature. By writing Mary into the story at key points and augmenting several of her more minor appearances, the Life portrays Mary as a central figure in her son's ministry and also as a leader of the nascent church. The result is a veritable “Gospel of Mary” in the section of the Life that emphasizes Mary's essential contributions to her son's earthly mission and her leadership of the apostles in the early Christian community: the Life gives a brief account of the same events recorded in the canonical gospels, but with the Virgin Mary brought to the fore at nearly every instance. The origins of these traditions are not entirely clear, and while they may be the work of the Life's author, it is equally possible that they reflect now lost apocryphal traditions about Mary that once circulated in late antiquity. In any case, the attention that this earliest Life of the Virgin lavishes on the activities of Mary and other women as important leaders in the formation of Christianity is rather striking and quite exceptional among the literature of Christian late antiquity. In its emphasis on the roles played by these women it represents a surprising ancient predecessor to much of the recent work in New Testament scholarship to recover the importance of women in the early Christian movement.

Looking Glasses and Neverlands: Lacan, Desire, and Subjectivity in Children's Literature (review)

Reviewed by: Looking Glasses and Neverlands. Lacan, Desire, and Subjectivity in Children’s Literature Hamida Bosmajian (bio) Karen Coats . Looking Glasses and Neverlands. Lacan, Desire, and Subjectivity in Children’s Literature. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2004. Karen Coats's study is a major contribution to the content and form of critical discourse about children's literature. In her interdisciplinary Lacanian reading and interpretation of primarily canonical narratives in children's literature, Coats demonstrates how a psychological paradigm, a narrative text, and a young reader are contextualized by the concepts and values of a given time, in this case modernism. She does so as an attentive and active interpreter of theory and narrative, revealing the relation between each in such a way that the reader is called to "understand Lacan" and surprised to "discover Lacan" in children's literature. Coats contends that modernist children's literature mirrors and shapes the process of the child's evolving subjectivity, which is always "a [End Page 292] movement between that which we control and that which controls us" (5). The visual or linguistic images in children's literature affect the child from the outside in, shaping the child's social identity and constituting the child's subconscious: "By offering substantive representations for words and things to the child, stories, especially those found in children's literature, provide signifiers—conventional words and images—that attach themselves to unconscious processes and have materials effects on the child's developing subjectivity" (2). Adults create and produce, select and share stories with the young child and thereby become ethically accountable as they mediate for the child whatever social identity and values are deemed appropriate. The first chapter, "How to Save Your Life. Lessons from a Runt Pig," interprets Charlotte's Web as a Lacanian allegory of the advent of subjectivity, allegorical in the sense that the story has at least two levels of meaning in Fern Arable's, Wilbur's, and the child reader's journey from the Real, through the Imaginary, to the Symbolic. The second, third, and fourth chapters consider the loss of the (m)Other, the unmediated Real and its recuperation through image and language, which leads the developing consciousness through alienation, to self-idealization, the Imaginary (Looking Glass World and Neverland) in preparation for the Symbolic, the world of the Name of the Father, of rules and laws. In the process, the developing subjectivity relentlessly follows an exclusionary logic that eliminates more and more possibilities. Even looking at the simplest pre-reader picture book, the child is prepared to eliminate options, e.g., "A is for apple and B is for ball." Chapters five, six, and seven focus on the outside pressures the Symbolic brings to bear on the developing subject and the prospects of resisting those pressures. Thus Coats discusses Mary Poppins and Pippi Longstocking not in terms of gender socializations, but in terms of how the female creative imagination that pops into a phallocentric Symbolic or the sheer "queerness" of Pippi resist the world of the Name of the Father. In her discussion of race, she defines whiteness as "the master signifier" that must be decentered so that authentic diversity is possible and the exclusionary logic is dissolved. In her last chapter, "Abjection and Adolescent Fiction. Ways Out," Coats views the second crisis of identity in the growing child: adolescence, where the subject has to remap the body's physical changes—which in and of themselves are real and unmediated—and transform emotions of abject revulsion into creative erotic acceptance and a positive ethics of the Real. In Charlotte's Web the allegorists are the voices of E. B. White and Charlotte, both of whom devise Imaginary and Symbolic means to help [End Page 293] the evolving subject(s) triumph over "the terror of being-toward-death" (16). "Enjoying her symptom," Fern observes the talking farm animals, allowing the Imaginary to mediate the subject for the Symbolic. It seemed to this reviewer that Coats personally cherishes and values Charlotte's Web more than any other of the modernist narratives she discusses, though at times her use of Lacanian jargon is a rather clumsy instrument probing the fragile yet tensile strength...

Canon and Censor: How War Wounds Bodies of Writing

In 1938, Japanese authorities issued sanctions against the publishers of the magazine Chuo koron, suppressing Tatsuzo Ishikawa s Ikiteiru he'ttai (Living Soldiers) for its graphic depictions of the casualties of the war in China and the cruelty of Japanese soldiers.2 In 1939, DaltonTrumbo and his publishers refused calls by fascist elements in the United States to reprint Trumbos pacifist Johnny Got His Gun, portraying the interior monologue of an amputee. While the publication histories and the ideological circumstances of the reception of these novels differ, they both blur distinctions between living and dead and thereby share common ground as challenges to canonical narratives of war, exemplified by Ashihei Hino s Mugi to heitai [Barley and Soldiers, 1939) and James Jones' From Here To Eternity (1951). Unlike the banned narratives of war where the thresholds between living and dead are sought, in these bestselling novels the living are the living, the dead are the dead, and the twain never meet. Comparison of the processes of censorship and canonization during and after the Second World War in both Japan and the United States enables an assessment of the literary casualties of the period. Though such an approach cannot absolve us from the ethical responsibility of deciding in the end whether one regime is worse or more repressive than another, it does begin to close the critical gap between discussions of wartime and postwar Japanese literature, as well as the analogous divide between approaches that focus either solely on the canon or on the margin in the wider field of cultural studies.

Painting the Dark Side: Art and the Gothic Imagination in Nineteenth‐Century American Art

Painting the Dark Side: Art and the Gothic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century American Art Sarah Burns. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. In Painting the Dark Side, Sarah Burns argues that the canonical narrative of nineteenth-century American art describes a quest for a national visual identity, while at the same time, a number of artists unmasked a darker side of the narrative in which anxiety, fear, superstition, and madness ruled. This book presents a thoughtful, rigorous examination of the side in nineteenth-century American art. Burns claims that an exploration of the dark world lurking beneath the surface of nineteenth-century art actually allows us to understand the mainstream more fully. Thus, she explores the work of eight artists in biographical and historical, social, and cultural terms to reveal broader cultural anxieties about social, political, and economic instability in a rapidly changing, industrializing society. Burns traces the personal demons and artistic anxieties in the art of four artists working in antebellum America (Thomas Cole, David Gilmour Blythe, Washington Allston, and John Quidor), and of four artists active in postbellum America (William Rimmer, Elihu Vedder, Thomas Eakms, and Albert Pinkham Ryder). Each chapter is dedicated to a single artist and contains expansive but detailed explorations of how local anxieties prove symptomatic of larger societal insecurities. The nineteenth-century society that Burns describes was one that prized enlightenment, industrialization, imperialism, hard work, self-help, science, order, and progress, and sought to establish a stable and balanced society in which everyone had a well-defined place and a clear set of proscribed and prescribed behaviors. Fissures caused by rapid industrialization, slavery, immigration, and urban poverty, however, generated fears of societal chaos and disorder. Painting the Dark Side explores how the particular fears of eight artists-plagued by self-doubt, torn between their public personae and private selves, caught between the rational and irrational world-are indicators of larger social and cultural anxieties. Burns explores how fears of Jacksonian democracy, downward social mobility, poverty and anarchy in the modern city, fear of violent slave uprisings, terrors of internecine struggle, brutal clashes among the immigrant under classes, a clamor for women's rights, and even suspect scientific practices were viewed as symptoms of a wider social malaise that, left unchecked, could lead to chaos. In chapter one, the author analyzes Thomas Cole's rejection of his modest origins to gain entree into the elite society of his patrons, and whose antipathy for and fear of mob rule grew as he rose in society. Burns expands this argument to show how the dominant classes increasingly portrayed the rising industrial city as physically and philosophically sullied, a diseased and depressed body politic. In chapter two, Burns argues that David Gilmour Blythe painted Pittsburgh from a thug's eye view to critique self-satisfied middle-class dabblers in social reform. He courted an elite market for his paintings, yet painted in a strange muddy style of scrubby lines, sketchy faces, rubbery surfaces, [and] smeary paint that antagonized potential patrons (68). Burns proposes that Blythe's belligerent and acerbic art, as well as his drunken cynicism, points to larger apprehensions about the volatility of immigrant populations and an antagonistic, bellicose, and often drunken underclass. Chapter three describes how Washington Allston lived a double life of a Southern slave-holder and a cosmopolitan artist embedded in a strongly abolitionist Boston society. Burns's study of Allston's individual guilt and fear as a slave owner is expanded to suggest that his fears were indicative of widespread uneasiness in white Southern antebellum society. In chapter four, John Quidor is portrayed as an artist who aspired to acceptance into the artistic mainstream by basing most of his art on the writings of Washington Irving, but who actually earned local fame and a good sum of money by painting New York city fire trucks, and who lived the rough, coarse, drunk, and disorderly life of the working classes. …

Buddhism in war: A study of cause and effect from Sri Lanka

In this article, I explore two attitudes towards war present among Buddhists in contemporary Sri Lanka: support for an all‐out military victory over the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and support for a ceasefire followed by a negotiated settlement. After a phenomenological presentation of the two approaches, I turn to the factors that have conditioned them. I argue that canonical narrative is drawn on both to support the war and to reject it and then look at more recent colonial history to provide further data, particularly to the dynamic undergirding Buddhist support for war. In the nineteenth century, under British rule, one significant ‘other’ for Sri Lankan Buddhists was the Christian. A pattern of spirited defence developed in the face of what was seen as humiliation and betrayal at the hands of Christians. This pattern, the paper suggests, can throw light on responses in the present to the very different ‘other’, the LITE.

Évangile et évangélisme (XII e –XIII e siècle) (review)

et evangelisme (XlI^sup e^-XIII^sup e^ siecle). [Cahiers de Fanjeaux: Collection d'Histoire religieuse du Languedoc au Moyen Age, 34.] (Toulouse: Editions Privat. 1999. Pp. 384. 170 F; 24,91 Euros.) If anyone should ask you to what religious order you belong, tell him order of gospel, which is basis of all rules. Thus Stephen of Muret, leader of twelfth-century pauperes Christi movement which became order of Grandmont. It is from sentiments like this, indicative of what M.-D. Chenu called evangelical awakening of twelfth century, that this collection of essays takes its inspiration. This is thirty-fourth volume in an impressive series devoted specifically to religious history of Languedoc. The essays, all in French, are arranged in three subsections under titles Reception: Reading, Hearing, and Seeing Gospel; Images of Evangelism; and in Institution and Practice (my translation-more on this issue later). As is clear, first section addresses Evangile and rest address evangelisme. The first section on reception of Gospel includes a brief study of manuscript evidence for circulation of Gospel texts and an interesting if somewhat disjointed study by Nicole Beriou of use of term evangelium. That term was used to refer to four canonical narratives of New Testament is rather clear and not worth energy author spends on it; but analysis of synonymous use of 'gospel' and 'truth' in context of preaching is more compelling. Valerie Galent-Fasseur's contribution on gospels in southern French literature of period is more an examination of their absence, which is useful, if a bit frustrating. The second and third sections are beset with a historiographical problem: Evangelism is not really a term that is contemporary to period studied. So gathering of essays here is predicated upon an anachronistic category (as someone interested in medieval mysticism, I can hardly object to this in principle), and this category does not receive adequate definition in introduction and/or any of contributions. In fact, several of contributors note difficulty (see, e.g., Guy Lobrichon's essay). But this is a concern with organizing principle of compilation, not with contributions, which are on whole quite interesting and good. The essay in Part Two by Jean-Yves Tilliette on lexicon of evangelism and systems of value in twelfth century is an excellent examination of concepts of the primitive church, apostolic life, and following naked Christ in rhetoric of reform following Gregorian era. …

'I know I'm doing a good job': Canonical and autobiographical narratives of teenage mothers

Teenage pregnancy is typically presented as a problem to be solved, if not as an epidemic in need of urgent intervention. This paper reports on Australian research that examined the phenomenon of teenage motherhood from the perspective of the young women themselves. The theoretical frame of narrative was adopted in order to understand both the way in which the young mothers were making sense of their own lives, and the way in which they interpreted the canonical narrative of teenage motherhood. Interviews with 20 young mothers demonstrated both their awareness of the canonical narrative, in which they are judged and condemned, and their contrasting autobiographical narratives, in which they are represented as good mothers who are capable of learning the skills of motherhood. Although the women refused to emphasise the disadvantages of teenage motherhood, they acknowledged difficulties. Throughout their autobiographical accounts, a 'consoling plot' was evident. Young women may be supported in their endeavour to emplot their lives to their own benefit by family narratives of teenage motherhood.

The Past as Simulacrum in the Canonical Narratives of Christian Origins

AbstractThis article meditates on the ambiguity of the concept of 'history' in Christian thought and in the historiography of Christian origins. After exploring the ambiguity of 'history', using Jesus as the illustrative case in point, it is argued that 'history' is itself the result of a complex process of historical production, a production of the kind that renders history, especially histories of highly valued origins, into narrative representations of believed-in imaginings, into mythographies that are nevertheless taken to be histories. Recognizing that history is fictioned to serve interests in the present turns history always into 'our' history, and recognizing, too, that this history is imagined to be history as it really was and the only history there can be- in effect turning the past into a simulacrum3/4. exposes 'history' as a mechanism for rationalising wordviews, social constitutions, and cultural preferences. Intellectually and morally, it exposes the fact that 'doing history' is never an innocent doing.

Adolescent sex and the romantic narrative: Why some young heterosexuals use condoms to prevent pregnancy but not disease

Young heterosexuals are at risk of contracting sexually transmitted diseases as a result of their inconsistent use of condoms. When a condom is used it is more likely to be to avoid pregnancy than as protection from disease. In this paper, adolescent use of condoms is theorized within the canonical narrative of romance, as one major factor in the social construction of love and sex. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 57 young women and men (aged 16–18 years) in Victoria, Australia. They interpreted their sexual relationships as part of the quest for love, in which women and men had different and well-defined roles to play. In particular, women were understood to value intimate relationships whereas men sought coitus as an end in itself. Discourses of heterosexuality, including the significance of a girl's reputation and the need to accommodate the male sex drive, are linked by the explanatory plot of romance. It is argued that the use of condoms for contraception is consistent with a romantic vision of the future and upholds male virility, but that the discourse of ‘safe sex’ can not be emplotted within the romantic narrative.

Footprints of Oral Transmission in the Canonical Passion Narratives

Footprints of Oral Transmission in the Canonical Passion Narratives

Maternal Iconography and Nation Building in Alice Cary's "Mrs. Walden's Confidant"

In Walden Thoreau famously observes that men appear never to have considered what a house is, and are actually though needlessly poor all their lives because they think that they must have such a one as their neighbors have.[1] Five years later the well-known Ohio-born writer and poet Alice Cary published a short story whose title (no doubt unintentionally) echoes Thoreau's famous work but takes issue with many of its values. In Mrs. Walden's Confidant (1859) Cary concludes that women are spiritually impoverished when they don't think they must have a house like their neighbors': good citizenship and spiritual development require competitive housekeeping. Cary's parable of republican motherhood takes place on the Fourth of July for the same reason that Thoreau occupied his cabin on that date in 1845: like Walden it engages the relationships among independence, materialism, national growth, and personal fulfillment. proprietary ease with which Thoreau lets drop the date of his occupancy suggests intimacy with national mythology, a cozy relationship between writer and reader about the meaning of Independence Day. In Mrs. Walden's Confidant, however, this relationship is complicated by the main character's exclusion from the plot of ascending power that drives Independence Day orations, Walden, and classic narratives of the rise from small beginnings alike. When Ben Franklin describes his arrival in Philadelphia in the Autobiography, for example, he revels in his sorry condition because it permits the reader to compare such unlikely beginnings with the figure I have since made there. And he is careful to both include and contain his future wife's role by defining her as a witness rather than participant in this figure's construction: as he passes her house he notes that she, standing at the door, thought I made -- as I certainly did -- a most awkward, ridiculous appearance.[2] Miss Read is the perfect witness to Mr. Franklin's life narrative, but she has little else to do with it. In Mrs. Walden's Confidant, however, Cary explores how women can get beyond this impasse by becoming readers -- and writers their own stories, and how within certain limitations they can govern narratives of exclusion and even victimization. In so doing she offers instructive lesson about the perils and rewards of the antebellum woman's participation in nation building and a forceful I alternative to canonical narratives of auto-american-biography[3] and their fictional counterparts. Mrs. Walden's Confidant takes place in and near a small Ohio village whose rapid growth is presented as representative of both Western expansion and national prosperity: it is the nation's most flattering vision of itself in miniature. The soil was productive, and there was abundance of wood, water and stone; fine clay for making bricks; besides other advantages which made the farmers about naturally a little proud -- and this pride extended from their possessions to the property of their neighbors.[4] There is talk of a seminary and some half-dozen new dwellings and a third story is planned for the North American Hotel, for which the owner has commissioned a sign neatly summarizing the community's aspirations: an eagle soaring towards the sun, with the motto beneath, 'upward and onward' (p. 291). Thus the story's first few pages present the familiar typology of America as a rising country. Indeed, as the story opens, the village prepares for a general celebration of the Fourth of July to culminate in a procession lead by two of the of the oldest men in the neighborhood -- real Revolutionary soldiers (p. 291) bearing the American flag and flanked by little girls with baskets of flowers. nation is young enough to exhibit its still-living liberators, yet old enough to strike out on its own: youth and age are happy companions. Waldens are a notable exception to the generally celebratory air. Their farm is plainly in view, not only of the steeple and the liberty pole, but also of the people gathering in front of the hotel (pp. …

Female Divinities and Story-Telling in the Work of Tamara Kamenszain

Tamara Kamenszain (b. Argentina, 1947), in her creative writing and her essays, brings together two concerns. One is her examination of concepts of woman and femininity. She specializes in mythical and archetypal representations of woman. Her texts present such figures as the great mother and forest nymphs. On many occasions, she evokes a past in which female divinities were respected, even in the Judaic tradition that is frequently Kamenszain's frame of reference. The other current that stands out in Kamenszain's writing is her interest in Jewish traditions of informal narrative. In her texts, folk narrative displaces learned and canonical narrative. Her concern is not only with stories about magic, but also with tale-telling as a magic practice. Kamenszain's writing often makes the point that magic, and particularly feminine magic, has succumbed to modernization. Setting her own writing in opposition to this tendency, Kamenszain brings back feminine magic forces and endows biblical heroines with the talents of sorceresses, priestesses, or goddesses. Her narratives also suggest that women have a special way of reading, learning, and storytelling.