Narrative Strands Research Articles

Blood and Soul (1923) and the Cultural Politics of Japanese Film Reform

Research Article| August 01 2018 Blood and Soul (1923) and the Cultural Politics of Japanese Film Reform Diane Wei Lewis Diane Wei Lewis Diane Wei Lewis is an assistant professor in the Program in Film and Media Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. She is finishing a book manuscript on cinema, identification, and emotion in interwar Japan. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google positions (2018) 26 (3): 450–482. https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-6868239 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter Email Permissions Search Site Citation Diane Wei Lewis; Blood and Soul (1923) and the Cultural Politics of Japanese Film Reform. positions 1 August 2018; 26 (3): 450–482. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-6868239 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter Books & JournalsAll Journalspositions Search Advanced Search In the early 1920s, Japanese filmmakers increasingly adopted American-style production practices and strategies of representation. Resisting this trend, the Nikkatsu film company’s Mukōjima studio advocated multiple approaches to filmmaking, challenging the rhetoric of “purity” that was used by both cultural conservatives as well as the pure film movement, which pushed for Hollywood-style reforms. Mukōjima defended heterogeneity as inevitable, given the ongoing process of modernization, and the forms of cultural mixture, conflict, and contradiction it produced. Its kakushin (reform)-era policies made it possible for young Mizoguchi Kenji to make Japan’s first expressionist film, Blood and Soul (Chi to rei, 1923). Blood and Soul is based on a novella by the half-Russian, half-Japanese writer Ōizumi Kokuseki. It tells the story of a Chinese jeweler in Nagasaki who inherits murderous impulses from his mother and kills to reclaim the jewels he makes. The jeweler forbids his Japanese apprentice from marrying his daughter, fearing her blood is contaminated as well. After the apprentice takes the blame for his master’s crimes, a painter attempts to understand his motivations and listens to his confession, in which taboo desires and absent mothers provide the key to the story’s interlocking narrative strands. Blood and Soul is critical of reform-era discourses on cultural authenticity. Its complex exploration of fractured identity and intersubjectivity dramatizes irrational fears about cultural mixture and miscegenation. The impure body is depicted as a virulent aesthetic force that generates the dense intertextuality of the novella and the hallucinogenic mise-en-scène of the film. Interrogating the very concepts of identity and mastery of the self, Blood and Soul is an example of an experimental production that rejected the rhetoric of “purity” in a time of film reform, affirming cultural hybridity in the face of pure film demands. Japanese cinema, race, pure film movement, Ōizumi Kokuseki (1894–1957), Mizoguchi Kenji (1898–1956), Nikkatsu Mukōjima studio, expressionism The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2018 Duke University Press2018 You do not currently have access to this content.

The Indivisibility of Change: The Challenge of Trauma to the Genre of Coming-of-Age Narratives

Evie Wyld’s novel All the Birds, Singing (2013) draws attention to the interrelation of personal history, trauma narratives, and coming-of-age stories. I will analyze Wyld’s novel with reference to two bodies of theory: Bergson’s model of the “indivisibility of change” (p. 263), which re-conceptualizes the past as part of a “perpetual present” (p. 262), and Pederson’s revised literary theory of trauma, which deviates from crucial tenets of traditional literary trauma studies. Due to the novel’s unconventional structure of a backward-moving narrative strand interlocked with a forward-moving one, the crisis the narrator experienced in adolescence moves centre stage, which shows that, in the case of trauma, coming-of-age requires a continual negotiating of this experience. The novel challenges “strategically grim” coming-of-age narratives which represent trauma merely “as part of a narrative of the young protagonist’s redemption or maturation,” so that “resolution occurs as a matter of narrative convention […]” (Gilmore and Marshall, p. 23). All the Birds, Singing demonstrates that the painstaking processing of a painful personal history in narrative by establishing a dialogue of voices – and thus of selves –is an essential prerequisite for maturation. The genre of coming-of-age narratives, beside including novels which present a crisis merely as a necessary step on the way to adult life, thus also needs to incorporate texts documenting the persistence of trauma in a protagonist’s life.

Titus, Joan The Early Film Music of Dmitry Shostakovich (review)

REVIEWS 357 for concerts in Russia and abroad. This is decidedly not a portrait of a composer putting his affairs in order; it is a professional artist actively occupying himself with the future’ (p. 180). Bullock, following Chaikovskii, does not assume that there is ‘complete harmony between musician and man, of which you [Von Meck] dream’ (Chaikovskii, quoted p. 86). There is slippage between musician and person, as Chaikovskii himself often noted in correspondence, particularly when critics tried to tie down music’s effects too tightly or narrowly (pp. 41, 106, 146). Thus, within the ‘intimate world’ (pp. 9, 18, 43) that the Sixth Symphony embodied through formal innovation, through ‘Tchaikovsky’s ability to translate personal predicaments into artistic form’ (pp. 135, 193), and through musically ‘extreme emotional intensity and even suffering’ (p. 173), all three of which remain easily mis-readable as psychopathological symptoms, it is no surprise that Bullock, like many earlier listeners and critics, turns to the music’s ‘sense of speaking, of somehow communicating a truth inexpressible through mere verbal language’ (pp. 14, 58): the ‘voice’ trope (pp. 43, 52). He frequently describes Chaikovskii’s music as ‘sincere’ (though ‘authentic’ is his final word — p. 193), and the music’s distracting call as ‘inviting audiences to engage in acts of speculative and imaginative interpretation of their own’ (pp. 173, 21). Two minor points. It would have been good to read more about Chaikovskii’s love of the eighteenth century (pp. 80, 127, 132, 141) and his veneration of Mozart (pp. 98, 130); the latter figure could (without technical language) help to unpack key aspects of Chaikovskii’s aesthetic ideology. There are three typos (pp. 128, 149, 166). Final mention must go to a scene from Saint-Saëns’ visit to Moscow in 1875 that would have been worth witnessing: Chaikovskii and Saint-Saëns dancing an improvised ballet, with Nikolai Rubinstein on the piano (p. 28). Royal Academy of Music Anthony Gritten Titus, Joan. The Early Film Music of Dmitry Shostakovich. The Oxford Music/ Media Series. Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2016. xv + 253 pp. Illustrations. Music examples. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £37.99. Studies of Shostakovich’s life and music have continued apace in the period since the composer’s death, and although it is well known that in his early years he earned money in the cinema and, later (in 1954) expressed clear and indeed pioneering views on the nature and demands of film music, relatively little is known about the nature of his early work in this genre. Joan Titus’s monograph is the first thorough attempt to describe the music with which he played a part in six well-known Russian films from 1928 to SEER, 96, 2, APRIL 2018 358 1936. This comprehensively annotated volume is rich in musical examples and photographic illustrations of contemporary documents and scores. A unique and particularly valuable addition is of periodically signalled references to a companion website providing material unavailable in book form, such as, for instance, video clips: . The selection of early movies and music discussed are: the silent New Babylon (1928–29); an early example of sound film Alone (1929–31); an example of the new Soviet sound film Golden Mountains (1931); a Socialist Realist movie, Counterplan (1932); a minimal score film, The Youth of Maxim (1934–35); and finally Girlfriends (1935–36) about the girls of the future, as envisioned in Soviet society. A chapter is devoted to each film, preceded by an introduction that lays out the author’s main concepts behind her approach to Shostakovich’s film music, and the historical background to such studies beginning with Asaf´ev, and including several of the Titus’s own articles. An Epilogue attempts to assess the times in which these scores were written, their relation to his other music, and his significance as a pioneer who introduced a new era of Soviet film music. It also serves as a concise summary of the main contents of the monograph. Amongst the book’s many merits is the way Titus relates the writing of music for film to the narrative strand that many listeners seem to find in Shostakovich’s symphonic and chamber...

Why do public monuments play such an important role in memory wars?

In this paper I explore the role played by public monuments in the narration of national stories. I examine several monuments that have been built to promote various national narratives, with a particular focus on the South Australian National War Memorial, located in Adelaide, Australia. My analysis reveals that monuments have a dynamic capacity to embody simplified narratives of the past, and to shape collective memory accordingly. I contend that, owing to this capacity, monuments play a significant role in the narration of national stories. I also consider the power of monuments to serve vehicles for the promulgation of dissenting narrative strands. I ultimately argue that the prevalence of such strands reveals that many “memory wars” can never definitively be won—that is, that it is impossible to achieve homogeneity in history.

METAPHOR OF FORM IN “LILY” (architectonics of Icelandic Fourteenth century Christian Drapa)

Aim of the study is explication of the narrative technique of the person who composed “Lily”; research demands attention to the following aspects of the drapa: 1) its architectonics, i.e. correlation between the form and the content including topoi, symbolism and narrative strands; 2) the language of “Lily” and forms of narration in the text; 3) correlation between language and meter in “Lily”. The first of the three mentioned aspects of the text constitutes the subject matter of the paper, attention is also given to the value of the text in skaldic poetics and verbal culture of Iceland. Materials and methods. The first section presents information on the surviving manuscripts and shows the value of “Lily” in the culture of Iceland; references to Icelandic folklore and modern recordings help realize importance of the text. In the second section technique of the author(s) is studied with regard to both, medieval Christian literature and verbal culture of medieval Iceland. The study is carried out on the basis of edition [8] and all available Russian translations of medieval Latin literature. Analysis of the latter enables to identify the literary topoi and corresponding archetypes of medieval consciousness reflected in “Lily”. The third section is devoted to semantics of the title and to other textual symbols. The fourth section considers the mode of text existence and addresses authorship. Results. Analysis shows that the content of “Lily” does not go beyond few archetypes of medieval Icelandic and European Christian consciousness. Specificity of “Lily” is described as metaphor of form; the collocation denotes all semantic processes entailed by the transfer of the form of drapa into the sphere of traditional Christian culture. Metaphor of form is treated as a natural consequence of the main achievement of Icelandic skalds - involution of poetic form and turning it into artistic device [5], - a prerequisite to versatility of poetic content. Conclusion. “Lily” is finally classified as a text which highlights semantic and functional potential of the skaldic form and on the whole complies with the canon of skaldic poetics. Assumption is made that the author of “Lily” did not realise himself as the author of the text, though the surviving text is, no doubt, result of his individual effort. Working with traditional material, the author of “Lily” most probably created his text in accordance with principles of Icelandic Oral Tradition.

Já que a história se repetia com diferenças: o amadurecimento de Telêmaco e Milly Bloom

Entre as diversas referências e os múltiplos paralelos entre o Ulysses de James Joyce e a Odisseia de Homero, destaca-se o espelhamento entre Leopold Bloom e Odisseu, Molly Bloom e Penélope, Stephen Dedalus e Telêmaco. Entretanto, ainda que Stephen seja o “filho espiritual” de Leopold, os Bloom têm um herdeiro literal: sua filha Milly Bloom. Como Telêmaco, Milly é o espelho da família, tem preferência clara pelo pai e entra em conflito com a mãe quando amadurece. Ambos são filhos únicos que carregam a expectativa dos pais, e quando saem de casa às pressas para um mundo que lhes dará mais experiência, continuam influenciando um lar desequilibrado. Assim, busco no presente ensaio relacionar o arco de amadurecimento de Telêmaco, um dos tripés narrativos da Odisseia, às referências feitas ao longo de Ulysses à maturidade de Milly, elencando como esses dois movimentos influenciam as ações dos demais personagens e o desenvolvimento do enredo.

“Both close and distant”: Experiments of form and the medieval in contemporary literature

AbstractThis paper argues that some postmodern experimental forms of plot and narrative structure can be thrown into sharper relief by delineating them with medieval narrative practices of plot development. Ali Smith’s 2014 novelHow to be bothoffers an experimental plot that is shaped by the alterity and modernity of medieval and Renaissance art. Drawing on the technique of fresco painting, the novel narrativizes the experience of simultaneity created by recollections of the past in the present. The novel’s two narrative strands – one set in contemporary England, the other in fifteenth-century Italy – are linked in associative and cross-temporal ways and highlight individual experience. Bearing similarities to medieval episodic narratives, the novel maximizes an a-centric narrative design that capitalizes on the reader’s input in motivating the story. Subsequently,Tokyo cancelled(2005) by Rana Dasgupta is briefly discussed as another example of a postmodern novel reminiscent of medieval narrative practices: in this tale collection held together by a very loose framework, plot itself becomes the protagonist as an epitome of modern society’s loss of identity.

“The Blood Never Stops Flowing and the Party Never Ends”: The Originals and the Afterlife of New Orleans as a Vampire City

“The Blood Never Stops Flowing and the Party Never Ends”: The Originals and the Afterlife of New Orleans as a Vampire City

Further education, leadership and ethical action: Thinking with Hannah Arendt

In this paper, we work with the philosophy of Hannah Arendt to explore ethics and leadership in further education (FE), focusing on how leaders define the ethical compromises implied by austerity. Using questionnaires, interviews and observations we developed 10 case studies. It is not our intention to elaborate upon ethical leadership as a construct. Instead, we are concerned with how leaders in FE frame the challenges they face. Three narrative strands were identified in our data. Inspired by Arendt’s (1958) political anthropology, we used her distinction between labour, work and action as a conceptual frame to ground the storied accounts. We conceptualised ethical labour and ethical work as two pervasive but nonetheless constraining modes of ethical deliberation. A third construct, ethical action enabled us to envision a more expansive mode of ethical reasoning. Our conclusion suggests a way out of what we view as the ethical impoverishment of FE. A more secure ethical future for FE colleges is possible when leaders engage in expansive modes of ethical deliberation, ones that appreciate ‘plurality and natality’ (Arendt, 1958): what we have in common and what makes each of us unique. In such spaces staff, students and interested others make meaning of their work together, developing shared commitments to educational flourishing.

People and Nature in Asian Stories: Reading and Writing Materials for Eco Education

The purpose of this article is to make parents/teachers/writers of children literature aware of eco education through stories about people and nature. Written through the eyes of a child, many conservation stories not only empower the young minds, but they also help adults change their attitude to respect environment. The first part of this article examines such environmental stories as fables, folklores, short stories from Asia, while the second part is a project report on writing eco education materials, i.e. a serial of 3 environmental stories for young adults. Using Ecocriticism and Postcolonial perspectives to analyze the stories, the study shows that the narrative strands found in the stories include (1) depletion of the earth and natural resources, (2) people’s greediness, and (3) preservation of the traditional wisdom. Some stories are still anthro­pocentric so as to provide no space to explore fully the human-nature relationship in a balanced way. Although animal stories dominate the narratives, it is the specific and philosophic depiction of place and nature that give the stories Asian characteristics in their shared campaign to save our planet. This study concludes that the call for environmental protection can be done through young adult literature in a non-condescending manner instead of the usual patronizing-colonizing method

Mysteries of Lisbon and Intermedial History-Telling

Raúl Ruiz’s copious cinematic production has been treated as a single never-ending film due to his notorious disregard for narrative closure. Mysteries of Lisbon is his lengthiest film, consisting of a monumental adaptation (4h26min as a film, 6h as a TV series) of Camilo Castelo Branco’s eponymous novel in which interconnected narrative strands multiply across generations. However, all of these strands in the TV series, and most of them in the film, come to a logical resolution, indicating that the film’s protracted length derives from the chosen genre, the literary feuilleton combined with the soap opera, rather than being the consequence of an open-ended work. My hypothesis here is that the film’s self-reflexive procedures, questioning the medium and its hierarchic position among other media, bring storytelling close to reality and history-telling by creating holes in the narrative mesh through which the spectator can catch a glimpse of the incompleteness and incoherence of real life. In this context, the film’s constant intermedial morphings become “passages” to the real, through which decorated tiles, toy theatres, drawings and paintings change into live action and vice versa, silently subverting the idea that the story could have one single end, or an end at all.

The Filmmaker as DJ

Filmmaker Martin Scorsese’s Casino (1995) is structured around a compiled score of almost sixty popular music recordings. Scorsese himself, working with editor Thelma Schoonmaker and using digital editing tools for the first time, assembled and arranged a diverse body of pre-existing music into a unified score that plays for more than two of the film’s three hours. This article offers a close analysis of Scorsese acting as composer—crafting Casino’s compiled score in the manner of a DJ—and, in reciprocal fashion, editing film images and narrative to recorded music. Casino demonstrates highly varied, multivalent relationships between musical form and film form. Indeed, musical form proves a constituent element of Casino’s construction at multiple levels of magnification. The large-scale form of the score as a whole articulates the larger arc of Casino’s dual narrative. The strategic deployment of musical styles (from jazz to rock to pop) and the targeted use of lyrics as voiceover (often subtly deploying aspects of racial performance in popular styles) serve to differentiate narrative strands and fill out otherwise unspoken characterization. Scorsese builds several sequences in Casino on a direct, often audible relationship between song forms and narrative unfolding, creating song scenes in which compiled tracks heard as musical wholes grant a musical shape to discrete narrative units. Casino’s complex use of music does not, however, penetrate the inner lives of the film’s three primary characters, who seem unaware of the musical flow Scorsese employs to set their story dancing. The analysis draws upon the filmmaker’s own words about his creative process and offers select comparisons to other Scorsese films with compiled scores.

The Irascible Heroine in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Fairy Tale, “Princess Brambilla: A Capriccio in the Style of Jacques Callot”

This socio-linguistic study of a selection of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s literary fairy tales, particularly “Princess Brambilla: A capriccio in the style of Jacques Callot” (1820), focuses on his revisioning of contemporary social discourses on gender. Conventionally, these discourses depicted men as dominating and women as subservient, whereas Hoffmann’s wide range of fairy-tale characters subverts a strict gender differentiation. The authors’ use of a Bakhtinian method to disentangle interdependent narrative strands in this carnivalesque fairy tale reveals its lack of a single patriarchal ideology. By exploring the relationship between “Brambilla”’s unconventional heroine Giacinta-Brambilla, and unheroic hero Giglio-Chiapperi, their argument demonstrates how Giacinta’s dominance facilitates Giglio’s developing self-knowledge. Through examining differing critical interpretations of Hoffmann’s presentation of women, the authors argue that, set against the normative values of his time, “Princess Brambilla” takes a subversive position. In short, Hoffmann’s fairy tales, in their historical context, offered a new way to interpret gender.

Childhood, Gender, and Nation in Ulysses

James Joyce’s Ulysses is the modern national allegory of Ireland. However, it also contains many narrative strands involving children. In these strands, most children are seen to live unhappily, suffering from poverty, which results from British colonization, and from adults’ discipline. Children of different genders play different roles in the novel. Boys are the epitome of the future while girls are usually of a marginalized status and their virginities are sites of men’s desire and fathers’ worry. Children of different genders allegorize different aspects and situations of Ireland. Boys stand as an allegory of the Irish national future and character while girls are the allegory of Ireland’s land and culture.

Problems and Literary Characters in the World Prose of the 20-21st Century: I. S. Shmelev, D. Setterfield, Su Tong

Background/Objectives: The purpose of this literary analysis is to consider a range of problems in the life of literary characters described by Russian, English and Chinese prosaic writers. Methods/Statistical Analysis: The main provisions of literary text analysis form a methodological and theoretical basis of this research. Literary works are studied based on historical and functional principle. The comparative method helps to identify the distinctive features of the genre and stylistic creativity of I. S. Shmelev, D. Setterfield and Su Tong. Artistic merits of the analyzed works are justified by the degree of development of the concrete historical reality. Findings: The result of comparison of poetic texts published in different periods of time, which are artistically multi-leveled and evaluated differently by critics, revealed an artistic pattern of Russian, English and Chinese prose of the 20-21st centuries. The research aspect is focused primarily on the psychological identification of the characters, the writers' creative individuality and peculiarities of constructing a system of images and the plot. The study has identified the motives of these prosaic works relating to the characters' spiritual searches which determine the range of problems. Comparative analysis of the poetics of the studied texts reveals the traditions of national literatures and genre search by novelists based on the cultural constants, religious conceptions and family values. The House-Family archetype is interpreted by the writers as a ground for development of a harmonious personality. It is established that narrative strands are imbued with characters' thoughts about world order, harmony between man and nature, monologues about the sense of life, dialogues of people of different nationalities about the humanistic ideas of the century. Application/Improvements: Analytical reading of Russian, English and Chinese works in the context of the discoveries of world literature, understanding of those aspects of the writer's creative work, which demonstrate the continuity within the national literary process, enables to approach at solving the poorly-studied issues in the world prose.

Living my narrative: storying dishonesty and deception in mental health nursing.

This article proceeds from MacIntyre's moral philosophical perspective of individual human lives constituting unified narratives, in the context of co-evolving framing and guiding master narratives. This perspective accords specific episodes in people's lives the status of significant component parts of their developing, storied and enacted individual histories. From this philosophical base, autoethnographic principles will be employed in providing accounts from my own professional life narrative strand as a mental health nurse educator that speak to the issue of institutionalized dishonesty and deception in mental health nursing education and practice. On the basis of my pre-existing experience of publishing in nursing journals and scholarly identity, my argument will proceed from contesting the idea of an imagined stable foundational professional ethos underpinning mental health nursing practice, against which to judge professional dishonesty and deception. Using illustrative, relatively recent short stories, drawn from my lived-experience base as a mental health nurse educator, I will argue throughout at implicit and explicit levels that dishonesty and deception are always an inevitable part of the lives of mental health nurses and their educators. This is because of a constant gap between the nursing rhetoric and ideology that both groups espouse and how they actually behave on a day-to-day, mundane level, in and out of work and classroom practice. This gap shows up the public front of what mental health nursing is supposed to be about as dishonest and deceitful window dressing. I will assert that the many first-person, lived-experience accounts in mental health nursing teaching and publication are important educational resources in reducing this gap at professional practice, academic, and informal levels. Such storied accounts may also be useful in moving nurses and their educators towards more morally and ethically sensitive and reflexively attuned positions around what they talk and write into existence.

A Vagabond on the Road: The Pressure of Genre in Nadifa Mohamed’s Black Mamba Boy

ABSTRACTThis article argues that Bakhtin’s notion of the chronotope offers an insightful conceptual tool to read Nadifa Mohamed’s debut novel Black Mamba Boy and particularly its depiction of time-space in relation to the representation of her protagonist, who functions in the text as an exceptional adventure hero and as representative of the young Somali men who fought for Mussolini and perished during the Second World War. The novel can be read as an adventure of Jama’s travels across eastern Africa on a quest to find his father and as a historical account of the impact of the war on the region. These two aims, overtly identified by Mohamed, result in narrative strands that put different emphases on the representation of chronotopic space-time; the former – what we could call the adventure tale – foregrounds space and the protagonist’s movement through space while the latter offers important commentary on the way in which this story’s particular historical past writes the colonial present, that is, it focuses more on time and its impact on the characters. Black Mamba Boy interweaves the adventure tale with the historical narrative to tell a fascinating story of migration, loss and survival.

Boccaccio: A Critical Guide to the Complete Works. Edited by Victoria Kirkham, Michael Sherberg, and Janet Levarie Smarr. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. Pp. xix+555.

<i>Boccaccio: A Critical Guide to the Complete Works</i>. Edited by Victoria Kirkham, Michael Sherberg, and Janet Levarie Smarr. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. Pp. xix+555.

Organic Intellectuals in Zakes Mda’s &lt;i&gt;The Heart of Redness&lt;/i&gt;

Even though the theories of Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) originally responded to the turbulent Italy of his own times they can be successfully applied to post-apartheid South Africa. All Gramsci’s thoughts are impelled by the vision of an ideally transformed state in which what he calls “organic intellectuals” are to play the pivotal roles of guides and organisers of society. This paper argues that the theory of the organic intellectual is relevant not only to the changed and changing political situation in South Africa, but also to this situation as reflected in literary fiction. The paper applies the concept of organic intellectuals to Zakes Mda’s novel, The Heart of Redness (2000). Two characters from the contemporary narrative strand of the novel, Camagu and Qukezwa, can be identified as organic intellectuals according to Gramsci’s specifications. Both of them become organisers and agents of change in the village of Qolorha-by-Sea, without representing the interests of outsider groups or classes. As Gramsci pinned his hopes upon organic intellectuals in his own milieu, so in our time does Mda appear to maintain faith in men and women of the people such as Camagu and, particularly, Qukezwa, to bring about sustainable improvements in the lives of those South Africans at present excluded from wealth and privilege.

Song of Songs: Metaphorical Thinking in Watchman Nee's Narrative Theological Reflection

This paper will explore the Biblical book of Song of Songs and interpret Watchman Nee’s explanation of this Biblical text in the context of narrative theological reflection. While it is devotional in character, his use of metaphorical thinking can be transposed from theological interpretation to theological reflection, from textual narrative to gospel story, from gospel story to implicit personal experience. It is a significant work by Nee that uses six different narrative strands (corresponding to the book’s six chapters) to encourage the believer to engage with their own personal experience through re-telling, symbolism and metaphor in a way that makes the process of individual Christian growth meaningful. The process is taken through six narrative stages titled: ‘The Initial Pursuit and Satisfaction; The Call for Deliverance from the Self; The Call for Ascension; The Call of the Cross after Resurrection; The Work of God; and The Groaning of the Flesh.’