Traditional Canon Research Articles

How I Learned African History from Reggae

I was raised in Northern New Mexico, a white girl in a predominantly Hispanic population. The public education I received in this small Southwestern town was somewhat unusual, as it reflected the cultural diversity within at least our own community. So although I was subjected to the traditional Western canon, and plodded through Shakespeare, the American Revolution, and the diagramming of English sentences, the community made sure that I learned some Spanish and some aspects of Mexican culture as well. In elementary school I made skeletons from colored construction paper and paste to commemorate the Mexican Dia de los Muertes, or Day of the Dead.

Feminist German Studies across the Disciplines: Introduction to Grossmann, Ferree, and Cocks

The following three essays, written by historian Atina Grossmann, sociologist Myra Marx Ferree, and political theorist Joan Cocks, are a feminist contribution to ongoing debate about role of multi- and interdisciplinary work in emerging field of Studies. Defined in 1988 Studies Association Guidelines for Curricular Organization at American Educational Institutions as the interdisciplinary study of contemporary cultural, social, economic, and political life of German-speaking peoples in their historical and international context, Studies has been embraced most enthusiastically by scholars trained in discipline of literary studies. For literary scholars, Studies, often loosely associated with British Cultural Studies, has provided an opportunity to import Anglo-American methodologies developed over past several decades into their own field and to address a wider range of cultural products than was authorized by traditional canon of literature. Studies has found particular acceptance among younger, U.S.-trained Germanists poised to assume leadership of field as an older cohort of emigres whose intellectual production was oriented towards Federal Republic now moves towards retirement. To younger Germanists, Studies seems to represent a new, uniquely U.S.-American perspective on things German. As Marc Weiner put it in his provocative letter announcing policies Quarterly would pursue under his editorship: German Studies has begun to develop an identity different from that of its counterpart, (German) Germanistik, as manifested in a variety of intellectual paradigms that differ from those abroad. Despite claims to interdisciplinarity made in GSA Guidelines, then, Germanists have frequently considered Studies mainly purview of Departments, viewing it particularly as a vehicle that would allow them to broaden curricular offerings, teach courses in English, and hence reach larger numbers of students at a time of declining language enrollments. Unlike Germanists, however, proponents of Studies in fields like history and political science, other core areas of GSA, seem much more strongly committed to

Chinese Philosophy: A Philosophical Essay on the “State-of-the-Art”

There is no easy answer to the question: What is the status of Chinese philosophy? On the Chinese side, philosophy is much more than a professional commentary on and the extension of a canonical tradition constituted by philosophical systems and theories. Chinese philosophers have traditionally been scholar-officials whose theoretical reflections have been tempered by practical responsibilities—fully, the daily workings of government and society. “Philosophy” in the contemporary Chinese context, then, despite the avowedly Marxist orientation of the state, continues to range over the relationship between cultural values and the social and political life of the people. Philosophers have been and still are the intellectual leaders of society. Hence, a “state-of-the-art” reflection on Chinese philosophy from an internal Chinese perspective would be primarily practical: a survey of the intellectual discourse as it has driven and shaped recent social, political, and cultural developments.

Religion and revelation: a theology of revelation in the world's religions

Since first Thomas Aquinas defined theology as revelation, or the rational elucidation of revealed truth, the idea of revelation has played a fundamental role in the history of western theology. This book provides a new and detailed investigation of the concept, examining its nature, sources, and limitations in all five of the major scriptural religions of the world: Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism. The first part of the book discusses the nature of theology, and expounds the comparative method as the most useful and appropriate for the modern age. Part Two focuses on the nature of religion and its early historical manifestations, whilst the third part of the book goes on to consider the idea of revelation as found in the great canonical traditions of the religions of the world. Part Four develops the distinctively Christian idea of revelation as divine self-expression in history. The final part of the book discusses how far the idea of revelation must be revised or adapted in the light of modern historical and scientific thought, and proposes a new and positive theology of revelation for the future. The book includes discussions of the work of most major theologians and scholars in the study of religion - Aquinas, Tillich, Barth, Temple, Frazer, and Evans Pritchard - and should be of interest to many scholars and students of comparative religion and theology, and anthropologists.

Margins in the classroom: teaching literature

Margins in the Classroom was first published in 1994. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.For today's teacher of literature, facing a minefield of politics and theory, this book arrives as a much needed guide through the multiplying cultural anxieties of the college classroom. Margins in the Classroom brings together established scholars and emerging voices from diverse backgrounds to show how politics and theory can and do affect the most pressing problems confronting the contemporary teacher of literature. The essays in this volume go beyond questioning and examining existing practices to suggest fresh approaches to teaching the expanding literary canon within the context of the politics of the educational institution. Grounded in literary criticism, psychoanalysis, feminist theory, political economy, sociology, and philosophy, these essays apply new theoretical models to the traditional canon, identify new bodies of literature, and show how theory can be used to analyze these new literatures. Focusing on the politics of teaching and theory in the classroom, the authors explore the present practice and future implications of changing textual analysis, literary theory, and pedagogy. Their essays address the politics of literature as it affects the classroom, the design of courses, and the creation of new courses. They mold theory to the variety of classroom populations and materials the teacher of literature encounters today. The resulting volume bridges the differences between the languages of the classroom instructor and the contemporary theorist. Margins in the Classroom is unique in both the breadth and the depth of its concern over the disturbing, if electric, impact of changes in criticism, theory, and pedagogy in college literature classes as we approach the next century of academic instruction. Kostas Myrsiades is professor of comparative literature, and Linda S. Myrsiades is professor of English, both at West Chester University. Kostas Myrsiades is editor of College Literature, where Linda S. Myrsiades is an associate editor.

Speaking of Death: the Revision of Women's Fate in Wolf, Sanders-Brahms, and Bachmann

For years feminist literary scholars have pointed to the traditionally miserable fates of female characters in canonical Western narratives. In The Madwoman in the Attic, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar demonstrated the centrality of women's death, illness, and insanity within the tradition of English literature. They argued that, not only were historical women denied the power of the pen, of telling and transmitting their stories, but their fictional counterparts were often silenced in the most direct and irrevocable manner, through death (12-16). Even though the female heroine often died in order to achieve a kind of immortality, death confined her to a passive role, robbing her of subjecthood. Rachel Blau DuPlessis has explained the narrative logic of this traditional ending: comes for a female character when she has a jumbled, distorted, inappropriate relation to the `social script' or plot designed to contain her legally, economically, and sexually (15). Death is the payment extracted from the woman who digresses from the path of prescribed feminine behaviour. The German literary canon of the last two centuries reveals a similar tendency with an impressive number of main female characters who are killed or die. A rather grand tradition of female death extends from Emilia Galotti, Lenore, Gretchen, Luise Miller, and Maria Stuart by way of Hebbel's Maria Magdalene or Agnes Bernauer and Fontane's Effi Briest to Wedekind's Lulu. This is not to say that women characters have a monopoly on death in German literature, but the relative number of main female characters who suffer some sort of victimization or sacrifice is undeniably high. It seems to be the price women must pay to be a title character. As Sigrid Weigel has argued, historically there has been a clear division between the active honour and glory of male heroism compared with passive innocence and sacrifice of female heroism (145). Given this canonical tradition of female sacrifice in German literature, we might ask what alternatives to these female fates have been explored in works by late twentieth-century feminist authors. Certainly, contemporary feminist

L’éternel féministe : un discours critique et ses mythes

This study proposes to evaluate the efficacy of feminist criticism since it established its original programme in resistance to a critical and canonical tradition ruled by phallic « universals ». Whilst my reading recognizes the incisiveness of the new tools, especially in the concept of « gender », it regrets the loss of critical power resulting from a textual practice based around what has to appear as a reactionary, reflectionist and subjectivist aesthetics. Relying on a set of myths (feminist Fables, mother-theories, mother-texts), it inverts, therefore fails to subvert, the fundamental tropes of patriarchal discourse.

War in the Hebrew Bible: A Study in the Ethics of Violence (review)

116 SHOFAR Winter 1994 Vol. 12, No.2 Biale implies that the question of whether sex was "good" or "bad" was of importance in these sources. This assumption might hold true for some sources, but for each case it should be argued. There are other more minor problems in this book. Biale attempts to do too much in a small space. Sometimes he shuttles with dizzying speed from one methodology to the next, leaving ideas dangling. He correctly identifies, for example, control of sexuality with control of marriage and its wider anthropological ramifications in early Ashkenaz, but he neither develops this idea nor applies it to other historical periods. Occasionally he makes surprising historical leaps from discourse to reality, to no apparent purpose, as when he concludes from a single rabbinic tradition that "it would appear that those who lived in Palestine inclined toward remaining clothed while in the conjugal bed" (p. 52). Despite his continual claims that the cultures he is examining are not monolithic, he frequently describes them as if they were, juxtaposing writers from different places, some who lived over a hundred years apart. Some of his translations and interpretations of source material are highly questionable: explanatory notes should have been included. Finally, it is disturbing to note that the historical paradigm offered here is all too familiar: sexual dynamism in biblical times gave way to rabbinic anxiety and strategies of control which in the Middle Ages succeeded in stifling Jewish sexuality. Today, instead of the Zionists who will rescue the Jews, it is the Jewish American feminists who offer the most promise in "restoring" Jewish sexual health: "Indeed, with feminism, we come back full circle to the Bible, for if the role of feminism today is to serve as a kind of subversion of the traditional canon, this role recapitulates the sexual subversions of biblical culture" (p. 227). These are not mere quibbles. At the same time, they do not negate the importance of the book. Eros and the Jews will be of interest to the general reader, while serving as a starting point for the scholar. Michael L. Satlow Judaic Studies Program University of Cincinnati War in the Hebrew Bible: A Study in the Ethics of Violence, by Susan Niditch. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. 180 pp. $29.95. Susan Niditch is Chair of the Religion Department at Amherst College. Most prominent among her previous works is a study of biblical folklore Book Reviews 117 focused on the trickster. Here she has produced a lean, sophisticated study of the several different views of war at work iJ1 the Hebrew Bible. To introduce her topic, Niditch reminds us how our own American traditions of warfare owe much to the Bible. Causality such as this has prompted some biblical scholars to take up the matter of war, but not so many as one might expect. Moreover, recent developments in such disciplines as anthropology and the study of symbolism suggest that new tools are available for studying the biblical authors' wrestlings with war, violence, destructiveness. By several measures, then, the time is ripe for a close examination of the major biblical materials on war. Sifting through the major biblical traditions about war, Niditch finds seven principal topics. First and second are two types of ban, one in which enemies are killed as a sacrifice to God and one in which the killing of enemies is an act serving divine justice. Third comes the priestly ideology of war developed in Numbers 31. Fourth, various bardic views of war, probably developed in circles of warriors and singers, merit study. Fifth, Israelite tricksterism contains important angles for measuring popular understandings of war. Sixth, the Bible both (a) puts forward a pragmatic, expedient view of war, according to which any people simply does what it has to do to survive, and (b) criticizes this view-refuses to settle for crass pragmatism. Seventh and last, in Chronicles we find a somewhat revisionist view of warfare that stresses nonparticipation-confessing oneself powerless and letting God do the fighting. The ban (herem) devotes human beings to destruction. Niditch finds it to work in the biblical texts in two modes-to be of two main...

Canon Wars II the Return of the Founders

Higher education in contemporary America has been embroiled in a number of bitter controversies in the recent past. One of the most acrimonious debates concerns the status of the traditional canon of Western thought and its privileged place in the curriculum. Critics of the canon, most notably supporters of multiculturalism, charge that the traditional approach favors the perspective of DWEMS, dead white European males. Lorraine Smith Pangle and Thomas L. Pangle's The Learning of Liberty enters this emotional debate clearly on the side of tradition. The Pangles believe that a pernicious radical egalitarianism has infected recent scholarship and higher educational policy. Multiculturalism, in the Pangles's view, has unleashed a form of relativism that has undermined the pursuit of those eternal truths that the great philosophers of the Western tradition sought to uncover in their writings. Virtue is the central focus of this inquiry. In particular, the Pangles are interested in the connection between virtue and modem republicanism. In an earlier work, The Spirit of Modern Republicanism (1988), Thomas Pangle attacked the historians associated with the new republican synthesis, challenging the conception of virtue employed by scholars associated with this intellectual paradigm. Modern republicanism, Pangle argued, unlike classical republicanism, was deeply imbued with Lockean ideas. Modern commercial republics did not aspire to the austerity and sacrifice of personal interest that characterized the republics of antiquity. The problem for modern republics was to cultivate the requisite virtue needed for the survival of republican government while still promoting the ideals of liberty and economic growth. The Pangles's study of the educational philosophy of the Founders is shaped by the methodological and philosophical approach of the conservative political philosopher Leo Strauss. The Learning of Liberty reveals all of the

Middle-Class Ambivalence : Religious Attitudes in the Dianshizhai huabao

Erik Zurcher : Middle-Class Ambivalence. Religious Attitudes in the Dianshizhai huabao The article contains an analysis of religious attitudes underlying the written com¬ ments that accompany the illustrations in the first twenty volumes of the first Chinese pictorial, the Dianshizhai huabao (Shanghai, 1884-1898). The more than 2,000 comments written by the editors (no doubt in conformity with the opinions and prejudices of their urban, fairly educated readership) represent a basically conservative "middle class" Confucian value system, far removed from the canonical tradition of orthodox Confucianism. An attempt is made to clarify the rather ambiguous attitudes towards non-Confucian religious beliefs, practitioners, and ceremonials. Large-scale ceremonials of a public nature are fully accepted, especially if they have a communal and protective function. On the other end of the scale, manifestations of popular religion involving magic objects and private practitioners are utterly rejected as harmful and superstitious. The institutionalized religions (Buddhism and Taoism) occupy an intermediate position : the attitudes are ambiguous, not well-defined, or even self-contradictory.

Art and archaeology: A potpourri

Conkey, Margaret, and Christine Hastorf, eds. The Uses of Style in Archaeology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. viii + 124 pp. including references and index. $39.50 cloth. Davis, Whitney. The Canonical Tradition in Ancient Egyptian Art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. xv + 272 pp. including references and index. $60.00 cloth. Morphy, Howard, ed. Animals into Art. London: Unwin Hyman, 1989. xxv + 465 pp. including chapter references and index. $55.00 cloth.

The Canonical Tradition in Ancient Egyptian Art. By Whitney Davis.

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsThe Canonical Tradition in Ancient Egyptian Art. By Whitney Davis.Florence D. FriedmanFlorence D. Friedman Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by American Journal of Archaeology Volume 97, Number 1January 1993 The journal of the Archaeological Institute of America Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.2307/505847 Copyright © 1993 by the Archaeological Institute of America. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

A MELUS Interview: Judith Ortiz Cofer

The last few decades have witnessed literary historians and critics in the United States engaged in the formidable task of redefining the American literary experience to recognize the presence and integrate the multiple voices of vital but neglected minority cultures. Specific issues regarding the reconceptualization and opening of the traditional canon, critical approaches, curriculum content and pedagogical practices, the place of writings in languages other than English, and the intellectual and political implications of selecting certain works above others, characterize the ongoing debate and search for explanatory models to account for the distinctive cultural experiences of minority groups, and for a more faithful definition of what constitutes the total cultural practice of the United States. Within this process, feminist criticism, minority discourse theory, and the writings of women of color occupy a prominent and unique place insofar as they allow for a more multifaceted approach to understanding the dialectics of oppression and the articulation of various layers of marginality and subordination found in the cultural production of these groups. The writings of Latina authors represent an excellent illustration of how issues of gender, race, culture, and class become intertwined, expanding the terms in which marginalized groups construe their identity in relation to the U.S. mainstream society. For ethnic/racial minorities, coming of age in America implies facing the internalization of stigmatized self-images based on racial and cultural differentiations that are ingrained in the fabric of the American mainstream. With a long history of racial segregation and discrimination, U.S. society is still striving to reconcile with its true multicultural character and the need to properly acknowledge the multiple presence and contributions of immigrant groups that have come and continue to arrive at its shores. Coming from cultures in which women are burdened by patriarchal traditions that struggle to perpetuate themselves in the face of the many pressures and changes implied in the immigrant experience, minority women writers juggle with the tensions arising from these cultural dualisms, from the compounding layer of gender subordination found within the same cultures they are trying to validate, and from the collective socioeconomic and racial survival struggles of their own groups within the context of U.S. society. This emerging consciousness of the multiple forms of oppression

Art Museums, Autonomy, and Canons

Museums influence society's ideas about canons in relation to art and the aesthetic. Such canons, as represented in museum exhibitions and col lections, have sometimes been criticized (often legitimately in my view) for exclusion of artists from some (unjustifiably marginalized) groups. These artists include members of racial minorities, women, and others. It may be objected that there is a danger in some such criticism. Group membership might, it may be said, come to matter too much in choices by museums, rather than what should matter, producing and appreciating work of the highest artistic or aesthetic value (work also satisfying other conditions of canonical status).1 When this objection arises, various fears are at issue. There may be, for example, concern that issues properly artistic and aesthetic are being politicized in such a way that objective value or its absence is being overlooked. There may be the related concern that revised judgments about canonical value are being forced upon us, or that we are being manipulated, perhaps; that such judgments are not freely decided upon. There are other fears, but these two are of special interest in this essay. I argue here, not for the elimination of canons, but for testing, challenging, and supplementing of currently dominant canons in museum contexts by a variety of means. The testing, etc., should include subjecting traditional canons to the competition (in museum contexts) of deviant and alternative canons, and valuable work of currently doubtful canonicity. I do not try to describe all the forms such testing, and so on, should take, but only some. Without testing, challenging, and supplementing, it seems to me, the dominant canons, fortified by the prestige and practices of influen tial museums, contribute to the imposition of illegitimate authority, a viola tion of respect for autonomy in judgments about art and the aesthetic. What autonomy is, and whose autonomy is at issue (including unjustifiably marginalized artists, and the public whose experience is narrowed) will be discussed more as we proceed. It should be said immediately that the unjustifiably marginalized ar tists, and the groups whose sensibility they often express, are definitely among those whose autonomy is damaged. Others, too, however, sometimes ignorant of the process of unjustifiable marginalization, and of the possibilities of alternative approaches to canons, lack appreciation of

Taking Liberties: Digital Revision as Cultural Dialogue

I would describe myself as a cultural worker who is fascinated with the artifacts, histories and mythologies we construct about each other as individuals and as societies, whether in the form of family snapshots or official public monuments. Although my obsession with the distortions of perception and representation is based in profoundly personal experience, much of my work over the last 10 years has focused on representation, as encountered in mainstream media and in public space. My thinking on these issues has also been shaped by a number of academics who have challenged canonical traditions within their own disciplines. Among them are poet Adrienne Rich, in essays such as Writing as Re-Vision [1] and Notes Towards a Politics of Location [2], and historian Howard Zinn, whose A People's History of the United States (1980) [3] re-writes U.S. history from the perspective of blacks, women, Indians and poor laborers of various ethnicities. In this work and in earlier work, Zinn called for an overtly value-laden historiography that will the pretensions of governments to either neutrality or beneficence . . . [and] expose the ideology that pervades our culture-using 'ideology' in Mannheim's sense: rationale for the going order [4]. Zinn goes on to describe various rhetorical strategies that mask ideological bias. In a similar vein, communications theorist Herbert Schiller has helped me clarify my critique of U.S. media news. In his book The Mind Managers, Schiller enumerates Five Myths That Structure Content: (1) The Myth of Individualism and Personal Choice, (2) The Myth of Neutrality, (3) The Myth of Unchanging Human Nature, (4) The Myth of Absence of Social Conflict and (5) The Myth of Media Pluralism. In other words, we as contemporary news consumers are encouraged to believe that our media diet is varied, balanced and objective [5]. Much of my work has been an effort to challenge these beliefs, especially by counteracting certain pervasive media practices that Schiller describes: the fragmentation of information (through advertising, sound bites, etc.) and the omission of historical context. These practices discourage understanding of causal connections and responsibilities. My work, on the contrary, acknowledges-indeed, emphasizes-historical connections, multiple voices, conflicting perspectives and ideological bias through a strategy of juxtaposition designed to provoke thoughtful response. My original attraction to digital technology was (and remains) substantially based on the almost magical ease with which it allows me to play with the shifting and blending of images and text-in other words, digital technology allows the materialization of linkages in time and space that enhance understanding. Whereas in the past I might have employed electronic photocopier or darkroom techniques, I now rely primarily on my computer to facilitate the processes of image conversion, scaling and layering. The following works, which I created since 1984 using various technologies, demonstrate a continuity of strategies in relationship to meaning. These strategies transcend, although they also may be facilitated by, particular technologies.

When Intention Meets Response: Affective and Objective Reading

When Intention Meets Response:Affective and Objective Reading Roderick McGillis (bio) Steig, Michael . Stories of Reading: Subjectivity and Literary Understanding. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1989. I like the title of this book: Stories of Reading. The conjunction of a process—reading—with the results of a process—a story—is neat. Each story is a process and each story gives rise to further stories; in other words, stories as completed narratives participate in an ongoing narrative and consequently are never completed. One aspect of that ongoing narrative is the actual reading of the stories by actual readers. When readers read, they almost invariably are prepared to tell a willing listener about their reading, and when they do they must produce stories of their reading. These stories, like the original stories which the readers have read, have a truth value based not on the scientific accuracy of statement but on the rhetorical force of the telling. For Michael Steig, the truth that lies in an honest story of reading has pedagogic and humane value as well as rhetorical force: "there are also personal modes of understanding literary texts based on individual experience, which, when communicated, can enrich others' understanding and can move from the state of subjectivity for the individual to that of a gained, rather than prior, intersubjertivity for the social group" (xiii). Steig's intention, then, is to account, as ingeniously as he can, for his responses to several texts which are literary in both a primary and a secondary sense. He offers his response to the writing of critics (including himself) and students as well as to familiar and less familiar works of literature. The intention behind this acceptance of student writing as equal to professional academic writing and of children's books as equal to canonized works of literature is a healthy subversion of hierarchies. Steig notes at the outset that he hopes to "offend against both the traditional canon of English literature and the concept of 'great' literature." Many concerned with the study of children's books will perk up when he adds: "the distinction between children's and adults' books [is] merely a matter of intellectual snobbery" (xvii). And finally, Steig's intention is to demonstrate how extrinsic information is useful even in a subjective response to a work of literature; readers inevitably "construct" an author and any biographical or historical information available helps the reader build this construct. At some point in the reading and interpretive process reader and author meet, and this meeting leads to understanding. In short, Steig's laudable and heroic struggle in Stories of Reading is to reconcile subjective and objective approaches to literary understanding. Let me recount a brief story of my own which encourages me to accept Steig's sensible account of the relevance of personal experience to literary understanding. A few years ago a student of mine handed in a remarkable essay on C. S. Lewis's The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. I must say right away that I knew something of this student's personal background because she had told me much concerning her earlier life prior to the time she wrote the essay. She was and had been a victim of child abuse, and she began about the time I am speaking of to edit a newsletter for other victims of incest. Still I was not prepared for the long and intensely felt piece of writing she handed in. Over some eighteen single-spaced typed pages, this student expressed her revulsion towards Lewis's fantasy. She was candid and courageous in setting forth her feeling that this book presented in a thinly veiled form a violent attack on the child—both the child in the book and the child who reads it. For this student, Lewis clearly both disliked children and at the same time felt sexual pleasure in their company. She examined, among other things, Lucy's entrance into Narnia and noted the genital implications, both male and female, of the wardrobe and its contents; her incipient psychoanalytic reading was sharp enough to notice the "two mothballs" which dropped from the wardrobe when Lucy opened it (Lewis 12). She also...

Dark side of the dream: Australian literature and the postcolonial mind

Dark Side of the Dream offers an assessment of Australian literature from a postcolonial perspective. Taking a post-bicentenary look at Australian culture and society through its literature, the authors argue that the shape of Australian society and literature has been profoundly affected by the processes that began when a colonizing society from Britain invaded Aboriginal and dispossessed its people. Australia is not simply an autonomous White society; it also includes Aboriginal people and cultures and the problems of their relationship to the cultural practices of the colonizers. Nearly half of the book deals with Aboriginal texts, issues and themes, in recognition that this dimension of Australian literature is usually neglected. It also refers to recent work from Marxist, feminist and multicultural perspectives in order to analyze the traditional canon of Australian literature.

The Canonical Tradition in Ancient Egyptian Art

The Canonical Tradition in Ancient Egyptian Art

The Canonical Tradition in Ancient Egyptian Art

List of illustrations Preface 1. Introduction 2. The canonical representation of figures and groups 3. Variability, covention, and laws 4. The order of iconography 5. Academic production 6. The emergence of canonical conventions 7. The explanation of invariance: toward a history of the authority of the canonical image Notes List of abbreviations References Index.

Socio-Rhetorical Criticism and the Parable of the Tenants

This article seeks to provide a new and hitherto unexplored interpretation to the parable of the Tenants (found in Mt. 21.33-46, Mk 12.1-12, Lk. 20.9-19 and Gos. Thom. 65). By eliminating allegorical accretions found in the canonical tradition, the story is seen to focus on the relationship of the Jewish farmer to his/her land. This relationship is explored within the important theo-political theme of 'inheritance', a catchword of great significance when viewed against ancient religious traditions cen tering upon 'the promise of the land' given by YHWH to the people. When the parable was spoken to a first-century audience sensitive to the issue of landedness, two significant but contrary reactions were recorded within the tradition. On the one hand, the Gospel of Thomas testifies to a very early connection with a theme of reversal, as evidenced by the stone quotation from Psalm 118. When set against the narrative structure of the parable, it is seen that this theme of reversal applies to the landless tenants who are in the position to secure access to the land through the death of the son (legally or not). On the other hand, another tradition expected a vengeful response on the part of the landowner. It was this tradition, once a post-Easter rein terpretation of parable as prophecy held sway, which was the historical successor, easily incorporating the theme of reversal, now referring to the resurrected Lord. Potential for future exploration in parable research along this line is suggested. One of the more important nuances, however, is the careful consideration of varying interpretations within the same audience construct. With this important caveat, the potential for socio-rhetorical reading of the parable tradition is significant in providing a new method within parable scholarship.