Textual Boundaries Research Articles

An Incredible Story on the Credibility of Stories: Coherence, Real-Life Experience, and Making Sense of Texts in a Jaina Narrative

Throughout the centuries, Jaina authors actively engaged in producing their own versions of stories that were told in sources such as the Rāmāyaṇa, Mahābhārata, and the purāṇas. These authors self-consciously present themselves as correcting preceding narratives that they do not accept as credible. However, the question arises: what criteria determine the credibility of one version over another? This paper offers one possible answer as it appears in the Investigation of Dharma (Dharmaparīkṣā), a Jaina narrative that has been retold repeatedly in different languages throughout the second millennium. By examining its earliest available retellings—in Apabhramsha (988 CE) and Sanskrit (1014 CE)—I argue that this narrative traces the credibility of stories to the ideas of (1) coherence across textual boundaries and (2) correspondence with real-life experience. In this paper, I trace how these notions manifest in the Investigation and analyze the narrative’s mechanism for training its audience to evaluate for themselves the credibility of stories. Through this analysis, the paper offers a fresh perspective on the motivations of premodern South Asian authors to retell existing narratives and sheds light on the reading practices they expect from their audience.

Trans(inter?)textual Migrations (Relations?) in the Traditional (Postmodernist?) Narrative of Salman Rushdie

Salman Rushdie's narrative style reflects a blend of traditional oral storytelling and postmodern literary techniques. This duality makes it challenging to categorize him strictly as either a traditional or postmodernist writer. His works, such as Midnight’s Children, exhibit fragmented storytelling akin to oral narratives, where the narrator frequently digresses, influenced by their environment and memories. These digressions create intertextual relationships, not just between texts but also between the text and the non-textual world, a technique which is called the "grasshopper narrative” in this paper. Rushdie's Midnight’s Children is heavily influenced by both Eastern oral traditions and Western literary techniques. The narrative is interspersed with references and borrowings from other texts and traditions, creating a tapestry of intertextual and trans-textual relations. For instance, characters and motifs from Forster’s A Passage to India and Kipling’s Kim find their way into Rushdie’s narrative, creating a dialogue between these works and Rushdie’s own. Moreover, the novel’s fragmented structure and the presence of a listener, Padma, enhance its oral storytelling feel, reinforcing its connection to traditional Eastern narratives. The influence of Western authors like Günter Grass and Gabriel García Márquez is also evident. These influences blend with Rushdie’s use of magic realism and his unique narrative style. Furthermore, Rushdie’s cinematic influences and his use of film vocabulary add another layer to his complex narrative structure. Rushdie’s narrative technique is a hybrid of traditional oral storytelling and postmodernist intertextuality, creating rich, multi-layered texts that traverse cultural and textual boundaries.

The Annotated Ape in Thomas Love Peacock’s Melincourt, or, Sir Oran Haut-Ton

abstract: This essay argues that in Peacock’s novel Melincourt the copious pseudo-scholarly footnotes are integral to the characterization of the simian character of Sir Oran. In mutually reflective ways the ape and the annotations about him offer up a hierarchical ordering of relations—taxonomic and textual—only to call such ordering into question. By transgressing such species and textual boundaries the novel undermines satirically the evolving taxonomic and scholarly assumptions of its time, and the presumptive authority they inscribe.

The Statics of the Threshold

The paper is a narratological study that problematizes the graphic or textual demarcation between the preface to the novel as a secondary text and the novel as a primary text. Methodologically, it draws on the study Thresholds (Seuils, 1987) and attempts to explain Genette’s structural and functional definition of prefaces, especially those that the French structuralist labels as pseudo-editorial, through more recent studies on the frame narrative (e.g. Abbot 2004, Fludernik 2009, Wolf 2006). On one hand, it outlines the possibilities of the above-mentioned structural categories coinciding, while on the other hand it points to the presence of an independent, broader fabula in both the preface and the frame narrative.In particular, it focuses on the problem of the functional image of certain prefaces in the Enlightenment novel, analysing the prefaces to Prévost’s Manon Lescaut and Marivaux’s The Life of Marianne, while taking Cervantes’s Don Quixote as a historical starting point. The chosen examples demonstrate how and why the boundary between the preface and the novel became blurred in the 18th century, a time when the novel as a narrative genre was articulated and established. One of the main, if not the only, functions of the pseudo-editorial preface, which is per definitionem fictional, is to create the impression of authenticity, with the preface-writer most often using the topos of a found manuscript. However, it turns out that its “dramatization” goes beyond the textual boundaries of the preface and continues in the novel itself, proving that the graphic image of the preface as a paratext no longer corresponds to its functional image.Even if we can trace a similar narrative strategy in both Baroque and Enlightenment novels, it is necessary to distinguish between the reasons for it application. Don Quixote is an example of artful, dynamic, “ingenious” composition and parodies the preface as a rhetorical convention. The fictional nature of the Enlightenment novel, however, inevitably rests on an impression of verisimilitude, and consequently the preface, the privileged place where these two characteristics meet, becomes a full-fledged literary component of the narrative work.

Disputing the Cisgender Body in A Disputacioun Betwyx Þe Body and Wormes

ABSTRACT Whether in its medieval or modern instantiations, flesh conjures to mind the various material forms and networks that constitute the body. Historically, medieval theologies on the body tend to gender fleshiness and carnality as feminine, while the mind and the spirit are gendered as masculine. One surprising and understudied example that dramatizes these debates on the gender between the body and the soul is A Disputacioun Betwyx Þe Body and Wormes, a mid-fifteenth century Carthusian body/soul debate poem. Despite its conventional didactic theme, Disputation has provoked a lot of interest among scholars, primarily regarding the gender of the soul and the body. By bringing together medieval trans, feminist, and queer studies, my argument will consider how Disputation centers on the flesh as a thinkable node of matter that can become haunted, transformed, and even defiant in how it inscribes and assigns an identity to the body. In this way, Disputation presents a body that verbalizes a felt sense of gender identity while actively undoing — or rather disputing — the material signifiers of sex as conferring a legibly gendered subject, creating a trans plurality of voices and bodies within the poem that ultimately dissolves fleshy and textual boundaries.

SocialHaterBERT: A dichotomous approach for automatically detecting hate speech on Twitter through textual analysis and user profiles

Social media platforms have evolved into an online representation of our social interactions. We may use the resources they provide to analyze phenomena that occur within them, such as the development and viralization of offensive and hostile content. In today’s polarized world, the escalating nature of this behavior is cause for concern in modern society. This research includes an in-depth examination of previous efforts and strategies for detecting and preventing hateful content on the social network Twitter, as well as a novel classification approach based on users’ profiles, related social environment and generated tweets. This paper’s contribution is threefold: (i) an improvement in the performance of the HaterNet algorithm, an expert system developed in collaboration with the Spanish National Office Against Hate Crimes of the Spanish State Secretariat for Security (Ministry of the Interior) that is capable of identifying and monitoring the evolution of hate speech on Twitter using an LTSM + MLP neural network architecture. To that end, a model based on BERT, HaterBERT, has been created and tested using HaterNet’s public dataset, providing results that show a significant improvement; (ii) A methodology to create a user database in the form of a relational network to infer textual and centrality features. This contribution, SocialGraph, has been independently tested with various traditional Machine Learning and Deep Learning algorithms, demonstrating its usefulness in spotting haters; (iii) a final model, SocialHaterBERT, that integrates the previous two approaches by analyzing features other than those inherent in the text. Experiment results reveal that this last contribution greatly improves outcomes, establishing a new field of study that transcends textual boundaries, paving the way for future research in coupled models from a diachronic and dynamic perspective.

Riddles at Work in the Early Medieval Tradition: Words, Ideas, Interactions

Riddles at Work in the Early Medieval Tradition: Words, Ideas, Interactions

"The Mournful Echo": Intimacy in American Recitations and Periodical Reprinting of "Mother and Poet," 1861–1879

"The Mournful Echo":Intimacy in American Recitations and Periodical Reprinting of "Mother and Poet," 1861–1879 Elizabeth Howard (bio) In Book I of Aurora Leigh, the young author Aurora asks of her sources of inspiration, "My own best poets am I one with you/That thus I love you, or but one through love?"1 While Elizabeth Barrett Browning's heroine debates the causes of her affinity for the poetry of others, the intimacy she feels toward them she asserts without qualification.2 While the possibilities for intimacy between poem, poet, and reader are expansive, Aurora's "oneness" describes affinity, proximity, and even exclusivity as features of poetic intimacy. In addition to the reader's or audience's affinity with a particular poet, poems can also foster poetic intimacy outside the textual boundaries of the poem itself, largely by means of the physical spaces and pages in which they appear and reappear. Of the spaces for aural poetry performances in the mid-nineteenth century, the salon curated an intimacy defined by its shared-but-semiprivate setting, its discrete temporality, and the slippage between audience and performers. The periodical likewise fostered a poetic intimacy with its readers, curating textual spaces on the printed page, which mediated the reader's intimacy with the poem as well as with an "imagined community" of readers and editors.3 A case study of poetic media's competing claims to intimacy in the 1860s and 1870s, this essay juxtaposes two media replications of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's "Mother and Poet" (1861) between 1861 and 1879—the salon recitation and the periodical reprinting—to assess each medium's curation of intimacy in a poetic encounter. My transatlantic analysis of U.S. performances and reprintings of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's poem during and after the American Civil War not only opens comparative contexts for curating poetic intimacy, but it also underscores poetry's capacity to voice mimetic grief across national boundaries in a variety of media. [End Page 165] I begin this essay reviewing recitations of "Mother and Poet," giving comparative attention to performances in salon spaces. Consolidating the popular criteria for evaluation, I compare salon recitations of "Mother and Poet" with reviews of its performance in concert halls, at benefit readings, and school recitations. In a wide range of recitations of "Mother and Poet," the poem's death events are often eclipsed by the audience's interest in the poem's emotional expression, particularly how grief sounds when voiced by a body. "Mother and Poet" generated a particular enthusiasm not only for its performative possibilities in vocalizing pathos, but also for its aural experience since recitations of "Mother and Poet" change the print poem's aural imaginary into an explicitly auditory experience. American reviews of recitations of "Mother and Poet" give their attention almost exclusively to the interaction between the performer's voice, physical presence, and persona in a particular space.4 Elizabeth Barrett Browning's poem gives its dramatic attention to a grieving mother who describes her plight with italicized first-person pronouns and third-person demonstrative adjectives; if Emilio and Alfredo are absented by their death, their mother is adamantly present in the poem; she is both the emphatic "me" who ends the first stanza (l. 5) and the agonized "This woman, this" of the second stanza (l. 8). In reviews of recitations of "Mother and Poet," however, the particularity of "[t]his woman, this" is tethered to the performer: the audience shares its intimacy in an aural experience with the voice and presence of a particular performer in ways that efface or diminish the presence of the grieving mother in the poem. In its American periodical reprintings, the attention that "Mother and Poet" gives to the grieving speaker—its "This woman, this"—likewise shifts its object away from Barrett Browning's narrator. This time, however, the American periodical reprintings of the 1860s overwhelmingly emphasize the imagined American maternal reader as sharing with the poem's Italian narrator a similar, even an identical crisis of loss. In the periodical the poem is given direct explanatory power to describe the familial costs of the American Civil War over the 1860s and 1870s. The poem is reprinted...

Annika Mann. Reading Contagion: The Hazards of Reading in the Age of Print.

Annika Mann. <i>Reading Contagion: The Hazards of Reading in the Age of Print</i>.

Narrative Concepts in the Study of Eighteenth-Century Literature, ed. Liisa Steinby and Aino Mäkikalli.

<i>Narrative Concepts in the Study of Eighteenth-Century Literature</i>, ed. Liisa Steinby and Aino Mäkikalli.

Too many hands: a bureaucratic screenwriting for the Czech silent national epic Svatý Václav (St. Wenceslas) (1930)

This article examines the Czech screenwriting practice vis-à-vis state-subsidised cinema. It focuses on the silent national epic drama St. Wenceslas (Svatý Václav, 1930) and sheds light on the forms of bureaucratic interventions throughout the formalised writing process. Drawing on Ian W. Macdonald’s concepts of screen idea and screen idea work group, the paper seeks to explain a collective dynamic and deals with the official historiography issue. I argue that academics had frequently altered the screen idea to suit their historical interpretation. Since this was enabled by their prominence in the collective, the article examines the hierarchy of power in the decision-making process and the forms of collaboration, competition and negotiation. In so doing, it helps us to rethink the screenwriting practice by explaining the functions of the screenwriting contest jury and the impact of supervisory voices delineating textual boundaries. The outlined screenwriters’ solutions then illustrate both the creativity in telling the well-known story within the limits and the pragmatic decrease in artistic ambitions.

Personal Citation, Rhetorical Practice and the Reinvention of &amp;lt;i&amp;gt;Or&amp;#237;k&amp;#236;&amp;lt;/i&amp;gt; Tradition

This essay responds to the shaping influence of Yoruba oriki on personal citation, a written text that constructs individual identity in contemporary time. It reads personal citation as a cultural production that is realised through performance. Through a close reading of two purposively selected citation texts, the essay examines the various angles of interpolations between this written literature and the rhetorical practice of Yoruba oriki. Specifically, it explores the use of oral features such as animated speech, histrionics, and narrative aesthetics, and direct discourse in its delivery and proposes that the construction of social eminence in personal citation depends largely on praise chants. It concludes that there is a noticeable appropriation of the linguistic and textual context of panegyric to which shows personal citation as a hybrid text that contests cultural homogeneity and textual boundaries as it operates within the logic of complementarity in its poetic reflections and linguistic manipulations.

Sexuality and the politics of the body in Zainab Hifni’s Features

ABSTRACT The increasing interest in Saudi women’s literature written in recent years is mainly ignited by its audacity to address forbidden themes, and ability to shatter pre-existing stereotypes about them as oppressed and silent women. The fact that Saudi women novelists write about sex in a society that is typically perceived as pious, hermetically closed, and ultra-conservative, severely disrupts this notion. In effect, through these types of writings Saudi women novelists are leading a textual-sexual revolution. This article aims to investigate this emerging trend by analysing Zainab Hifni’s novel Features. Through the medium of this novel, Hifni dislocates traditional sexual and textual boundaries, and challenges social patriarchy in its core by demonstrating that the very men who are ‘in charge of women’ have in effect breached the patriarchal injunctions that restrict women’s existence.

Happy Christmases are All Alike; Each Unhappy Christmas is Unhappy in its Own Way

The French postal service has been opening a bureau for Father Christmas every winter since 1962. Sixty employees are responsible for responding to letters to Father Christmas. In 2018, more than one million children corresponded with him. But what would happen if someone were to write to Father Christmas, developing a close epistolary relationship with him? This short story explores such a scenario. Pierre M. and Father Christmas have during many years maintained regular and personal correspondence. Yet Father Christmas’s attitude seems to have changed. Pierre M. reveals the evolution of their secret relationship to his mysterious friend. On substance, the short story offers an original perspective on modern marketplace mythologies. Previous studies depict myths as liminal spaces in which people negotiate contradictory meanings, practices and realities. The myth of Father Christmas thus involves compromises between ignorance and knowledge, life and death, the sacred and the profane. The short story tells how they evolve to define the identity of the protagonists and the world they live in. It highlights how they are embodied in hybrid artefacts like letters to Father Christmas and extraordinary servicescape. The short story also questions the performative force of the myth. It shows that it results from the interpretative work and ritual practices of the protagonists involved in an unstable actantial system structured around an enlightened person, an ignorant person and a mythical character. This is constantly negotiated throughout sociotechnical interactions, which, as in the case of witchcraft, may or may not realize the myth. On form, the short story adopts the principle of the eternal return inherent to the myth: it is plotted as a series of small variations on recurring themes and structural repetitions. Intertextual references to academic publications, literary tradition and popular culture enrich the narrative by extending it beyond its textual boundaries.

&amp; Juliet

Reviewed by: & Juliet Gemma Kate Allred & JulietPresented by Max Martin and Tim Headington at Shaftesbury Theatre, London. From 11 2, 2019. Music and lyrics by Max Martin and Friends. Book by David West Read. Directed by Luke Shephard. Music supervision, orchestration and arrangement by Bill Sherman. Choreography by Jennifer Weber. Set by Soutra Gilmour. Lighting by Howard Hudson. Costumes by Paloma Young. With Miriam-Teak Lee (Juliet), Cassidy Janson (Anne Hathaway), Oliver Tompsett (Shakespeare), David Bedella (Lance), Arun Blair-Mangat (May), Jordan Luke Gage (Romeo), Melanie La Barrie (Nurse), Tim Mahendran (Francois), and others. In 2018, Emiliahit the stage of Shakespeare's Globe. Morgan Lloyd Malcolm's protagonist became every woman, embodying their collective anger, and social media responded. Emiliawas established as essential viewing, working as a manifesto for a feminist revolution. The act of writing back across textual boundaries functioned as historical recuperation, placing the textual memories of the real Emilia Bassano into the [End Page 278]bodies of modern women. The West End show & Juliet—neon pink, glitter-accented, and set to a soundtrack of teen-pop classics—might seem to be an unlikely counterpart to Emilia. However, David West Read's jukebox musical, based on the chart-topping back catalogue of Max Martin, is just that. Asking "What if Juliet's famous ending was really just her beginning? What if she decided to choose her own fate?" & Julietraises questions about whose stories get told and by whom, and about who controls the narrative. Shakespeare's Juliet, with the assistance of a historically fictionalized Anne Hathaway, has the chance to rewrite her future without Romeo. Like Emilia, & Julietplaces early modern women in conversation with both a modern audience and Shakespeare himself. & Juliet's links to Baz Lurhmann's Romeo + Juliet(1996) cannot be ignored, with clear nods to 1990s pop culture throughout. Juliet's soundtrack was predominately Britney Spears-based. She entered, slumped against Romeo's tomb, singing a mournful version of Britney's 1998 debut "… Baby One More Time," arranged by Tony Award-winner Bill Sherman. Francois de Bois, her new love interest—a replacement Romeo, if you will—entered playing a Nintendo Game Boy and shared a duet with Juliet, Britney's "Overprotected." The musical's marketing also draws heavily on 1990s nostalgia: a special edition Smash Hitsmagazine handed out at London underground stations marked the production's premiere. The clear target audience is women now in their mid-thirties who grew up reading the magazine, listening to Britney's early hits, and watching Lurhmann's Romeo + Juliet, willing Leonardo DiCaprio's Romeo to notice when Claire Danes's Juliet wakes and craving the fairy-tale ending Shakespeare denied us. & Julietoffers the target market a remix: a second chance at "happily ever after," this time centered not on the Hollywood heartthrob but, as West Read notes in the theater program, "the independent, empowered" Juliet. Inherently meta-theatrical, & Julietis as much a love letter to theater itself as it is to Romeo and Juliet. From the opening moments, I was aware that Juliet's story was a play within a play. Soutra Gilmour's set design was self-consciously based on Elizabethan theater (specifically, Shoreditch's Curtain). Gilmour took the idea of a disused theater space to frame her design. She created a clear timeline between Shakespeare's London and modern-day Shoreditch, taking inspiration from East London's street art tradition. Artist Vic Lee's text and maps provided backdrops that plotted the musical's journey from the theater in London (both Shakespeare's Curtain and today's Shaftsbury Theatre) to the play's settings of Verona and Paris. The musical's pre-set drew inspiration from the modern-day [End Page 279]Shakespeare's Globe. The Players entered gradually, interacting with the audience as they settled. Costume designer Paloma Young took her lead from actors warming up before a performance: the players wore dancewear with a hint of Elizabethan period costuming, and t-shirts and jackets referencing earlier Shakespearean performances. A spot-lit jukebox placed stage right provided warm-up music and kept & Juliet'sidentity as a jukebox musical at the fore. Shakespeare entered in rock...

Multitextual Literacy in Educational Settings: Contextual Analysis and the Dab

Literacy is more directly linked to language arts than the visual arts even though both disciplines demand a high level of proficiency knowledge. This article examines how Feldman’s (1970) art criticism model, applied in visual arts and aesthetics, and Fairclough’s (2015) critical discourse analysis (CDA), used predominantly in literacy research, imbricate to reveal a multitextual literacy approach to gesture as an extension of utterance. Transdisciplinary textual analysis, supported by Bakhtin’s theories on addressivity and social language construction (1986), critique both cultural appropriation and media literacy. Gesture, as an extension of utterance, transpired from witnessing a random gestural act, blurring textual boundaries in a decoding process to suggest multiliterate awareness in learning ecologies. Art criticism reflection and CDA reveal methods for examining communication processes within cultural contexts and, as a result, suggest integration into educational settings as vital tools for conscientious textual decoding praxis.

Introduction

This special issue traces emerging trends in women’s writing of sex and sexual encounter in French, in France and in Canada since the turn of the twenty-first century. While women’s writing in French in the twentieth century notably re-cast the script of sexual pleasure to write of women’s sexual encounters in often empowering ways, more recent works tell more varied and often troubling stories. In the introduction, the guest editors present and contextualize the collected analyses’ examination of the negotiation of sexual and textual boundaries in female-authored texts that challenge thematic and formal constraints on women’s articulation of sexual experience.

Ordinary Letters: Contextual Research Method

In broadest sense, this article deals with ordinary writing, ordinary people and everyday life that researchers find hardly accessible and antidisciplinary. The author pursues two definite interrelated goals. First, it is identifying the nature of letters by poet Janina Degutytė and working out an appropriate method for their primary investigation. The second goal stems from the nature of these letters and the circle of the poet’s correspondents: that is revealing the field of letters covered by unauthoritative, ordinary people. Epistolary heritage by the Lithuanian poet Janina Degutytė (1928–1990) comprises correspondence with her closest female friends and acquaintances, none of whom (with only one exception) worked as culture professionals. Several tactics emerge from Degutytė’s letters, including bonding (when nothing particular needs to be conveyed, yet letter aims at keeping in touch), business matters (today best arranged by phone), and – rarely – narration (when writing from a place unfamiliar to the addressee). Such mode of writing can be adequately defined by the notion of ordinary or everyday writing (Daniel Fabre). Rather than indicating some lack, such definition reveals the essential quality of the letters.Ordinary letters invite asking simple questions stemming from them as such and looking for the most relevant ways of answering. Inductive approach produces three tactics of contextualization. The first one recreates the field of letters composed of letters by the participants of the correspondence and partly – of letters written by the main characters acting in Degutytė’s letters. Seven hundreds of letters written by the poet are presented together with numerous other letters. This allows for understanding the poet’s life among the lives of other people. The second tactic is fieldwork, which is suitable because the letter research is conducted at the time when contacting many of the poet’s correspondents and people mentioned in her letters is still possible. Interviews with these people particularly well elucidate the public and hidden conditions of life in the soviet Lithuania from 1950s to 1980s that were also mentioned in the letters. The third tactic employs investigating periodicals as quotidian press. Among other things, this enables discovering some hitherto unknown poems by Degutytė or different versions of her popular poems, published in newspapers and magazines. In general, this reveals variation in her work, its changeability resulting from modifications introduced by the author and her editors. All these three tactics reach outside the textual boundaries of letters and reveal their different contexts. This answers the requirements inherent in the nature of letters, since they, especially the ordinary ones, are characterized by metonymic language that points to the writing situation and denotes the lived life. This case proves that separation between text and context should not be overestimated. Another point stemming from the contextual research – all the tactics serve to create a polyphonic and polycentric view. Individual voices correct and modify each other, not falling into one coherent line. All this makes prerequisites for their kaleidoscopic, rather than microscopic, investigation (Liz Stanley).Ordinary letters written by a person who acts as a culture professional leads us into the field of letters written by ordinary people, enabling understanding them as a research subject still absent from the Lithuanian cultural studies, yet definitely worthy of them.Besides, all these epistles uncover simplicity of the lived life, providing researcher with a rare possibility to observe the daily distribution of attention, care, time and energy, along with intentionality of consciousness that is seldom available to investigation.

My Chosen Instrument: The Characterisation of Paul in Acts 7:58–15:41 by Luke Macnamara

Reviewed by: My Chosen Instrument: The Characterisation of Paul in Acts 7:58–15:41 by Luke Macnamara Eloise M. Rosenblatt luke macnamara, My Chosen Instrument: The Characterisation of Paul in Acts 7:58–15:41 (AnBib Dissertations 215; Rome: Gregorian & Biblical Press, 2016). Pp. xviii + 496. Paper €32. Professors and graduate students of the NT take as an axiom that a historical-critical interpretation of Luke-Acts involves a fourfold lens: the evangelist's purposes as an ecclesial historian, theologian, pastor, and literary artist to show the spread of the early church after the resurrection of Jesus. Luke's aims are personified in a concentration on Peter in the first half of his work. In the second half, Luke takes up the mission of Paul. Interpreters of Acts generally acknowledge the compositional features of Acts as a window into Luke's theological priorities. He shows the ministry of Jesus continuing in the work of the disciples. He diplomatically historicizes ecclesial conflicts. His pastoral concern is to show the Holy Spirit's movement in the Jerusalem leadership's embrace of the mission to the gentiles. In [End Page 339] Paul's biography, Luke engages the reader in an adventurous recitation of Paul's sea and land journeys through Asia Minor and the Mediterranean, his arrest and trials—personification of the church's outreach to the ends of the earth. Macnamara states that his study "fulfils in part the significant lacuna in scholarship… that no comprehensive narrative study on Paul in Acts has been published" (p. 393). One fact about the author seems useful for reading My Chosen Instrument. M. was first trained as a medical doctor at University College in Dublin (1994). Subsequently, he undertook theological studies, completing this 2015 dissertation on Paul in Acts at the Pontifical Biblical Institute under the direction of Fr. Dean Béchard. M.'s assumptions and method in reading Acts could be analogous to an orthopedist's orderly description and manipulation of the skeletal structure of a patient—recording an exact description, bone by bone, of each limb attached to the trunk. But an orthopedist is not looking at the effect on the skeletal structure of the patient's overall health, or on the digestive, neural or cardiovascular systems. Analogously, the study is best read as an intensive, detailed restatement or paraphrase, "bone by bone," of Acts 7:58–15:41, where Saul/ Paul appears. Given this method, a reader does not expect a complex "diagnosis" or set of conclusions that have a systemic relationship to Luke's theology, pastoral concerns, historical vision, or overall performance as reputedly the most sophisticated and artistically skilled author in the NT. Macnamara states the rationale for his textual boundaries: to consider the narrative of Acts up to Paul's split with Barnabas (p. 5). He "examines the specific portrait of Paul as it emerges for the first-time reader of Acts through the process of reading" (p. 19). M. approaches the first part of Acts as full of "gaps," which he defines as texts where there is no reference to Paul, or interruptions in the story about Paul. This assumes that Luke's entire narrative in Acts is meant to focus on Paul. M.'s literary analysis is most closely related to Gerard Genette's attention to "order of event" as expressive of an author's intent. Genette, along with Robert Alter and other literary critics, acknowledge "gaps" as intentional features of a narrative. An author, in standard literary theory, uses "gaps"—not talking about a central character—as a device to shift attention of the reader to subplots created by other characters, to alter point of view from a distant omniscient voice to a more immediate dramatic enactment, to accomplish a transition in time or place without needing to recite distracting detail, or to maintain readers' attention as the narrative shifts from "foreground" to "background." The repetition and paraphrase of what the text says may be appreciated as a disciplined journalistic exercise: Where does the action take place? Who appears? What do they say to whom? What happened before? What is the reaction of other persons present? The method can be an effective introductory learning practice...

Characteristics of Qur’ānic Textuality; “al-Nasḵ”

Since the “text” has received attention of all modern and post modern scholars and linguists, it has been changed. This “text” has different segments, some of them are applicable to Holy Qur’ān on the one hand, on the other hand there are some un-applicable too in connection of two textual boundaries of the “text”; bounded and un-bounded. From here many scholars declare that modern defined textual theory is totally un-applicable to Holy Qur’ān. Therefore, many Qur’ānic commentators and scholars refused “Intertextuality” with its all aspects. Anyhow some other scholars allow “Intertextuality” to be applied to Holy Qur’ān because of many Qur’ānic scholars have been interpreting this sacred text using the structural methods upon which contextual and intertextual phenomena and all the relevant conceptual components of this are based, this research intends elaboration of such dimensions of Qur’ānic “Intertextulaity” and “Textuality”, in particular, the Qur’ānic textulaity; “al-Nasḵ”; abolition, deletion and abrogation.