Textual Formation Research Articles

Is Ancient Jewish Studies (Still) Postmodern (Yet)?

Postmodern theory, with its concerns about textual meaning, identity formation, and dynamics of power, has had an impact on the study of ancient Judaism in a variety of ways over the last several decades. Theories of reader-response and intertextuality have particularly shaped recent work in biblical studies, while these and other philosophical concerns have contributed to postmodern understandings of midrash. The impact of postmodern theory on the study of the Dead Sea Scrolls is more subtle but nonetheless provides an interesting model for the use of theory in the study of ancient Judaism. Attention to the work of a particular scholar (D. Boyarin) or the possibilities for a particular theoretical approach (postcolonial theory) provides further evidence for postmodern treatments of ancient Jewish texts and history. Although the heyday of critical theory is now long past, the field of ancient Jewish studies has been shaped by theory-driven concerns about discourse, power, and the world.

Shakespeare on the Peking Opera Stage

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Successful Peking Opera adaptations of Shakespeare1 have attracted interest of theater-goers, both enthusiasts and connoisseurs, who have been able to approach Shakespeare the form that they like and are used to. For the intermingling elements of traditional Chinese opera and Shakespearean themes or stories, on another level, some adaptations have received applause from Shakespeare lovers, who enjoy the formal attractions of Peking Opera through the familiar Shakespeare stories. For such contrastive elements as Shakespeare and Chinese opera to co-exist the end product, the adaptation must be transforming process, which for each element to be valid the product, it must also be malleable. In all the adaptation cases, transformation has taken place on both sides of the adaptation: the source text and the adapting form. Thus, our concerns about such adaptations should go beyond the traditionalist suspect about Shakespeare's adaptability Peking Opera or the bardolatrist doubt that Peking Opera adaptation of Shakespeare can still be Shakespeare. What we want to ask is what ways transformation can be viable the intertextual practice of cross-cultural, cross-generic, and cross-media adaptation.Intertextuality Chinese Adaptation of ShakespeareHere I would see an adaptation as text and borrow the Kristeva's term of intertexuality as any text is a permutation of texts, an intertextuality (36) and appropriate the term evaluating Shakespeare adaptations traditional Chinese opera form. On the one hand, the key notion the Kristevan term of intertexuality is applicable to inter-cultural adaptation. The notion must be elaborated, on the other hand, order for it to be fully usable cultural context which cultural forms, such as Chinese drama and especially Peking Opera, have been influenced by hetero-philosophical conceptions of life and drama. When we read adaptations as texts, we detect both axes2 of the textual formation Peking opera adaptations: the author-reader connection through the bridging by the adapting artists between Shakespeare's foreign text and Chinese audiences and the text-to-text connection between Shakespeare's work and the Chinese product different genre. The gap between the author and the text, as translated or adapted, has been bridged by the adapter, who is actually the speaker to contemporary audience the Peking opera theatre. This essay will examine how the Chinese adaptations transform both the Shakespearean text and the opera form.To begin with, Peking Opera adapters must deal with the contrastive notions Shakespeare's drama and Chinese opera before they look for the common ground or similarities for viable way of integrating these hetero-natured elements. They demonstrate diverse understandings of the relationship between life and drama and thus use different dramaturgical ways of representation. The Peking Opera tells stories and represents life by exteriorizing the interior, that is, emotions of characters while Shakespeare's plays are comparatively more realistic and mimic life closed structure. This contrast reflects the different notions of drama. The Chinese dramatic aesthetics stresses poetic expressions of life. As result, ways of expression or formal nuances are more important than the or what is expressed; whereas, western drama as influenced by Aristotle's poetics, with Shakespeare as the best exemplar, imitate life realistic representations. A Chinese tragedy, for example, is not to engender fear and pity, but teaches moral lesson with or without the hero's death. Accordingly, death and sadness or other strong emotions are symbolically represented with dances, singings, acrobatics, and martial arts so that audiences are always fascinated by the artistic performances. As put by Lan, in Chinese tragedies, the emotions are excited by the outer style (the exquisite techniques) so that formal aesthetics is more appreciated than the content (591). …

Stories of the Babylonian Talmud (review)

Reviewed by: Stories of the Babylonian Talmud Laurence L. Edwards Stories of the Babylonian Talmud, by Jeffrey L. Rubenstein. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010. 316 pp. $55.00. It is characteristic of the style of the Talmud that the words of many generations are presented on each page, edited in such a way as to appear to be a single flowing conversation. As in biblical studies, modern scholarship on the Talmud strives to identify, expose, and analyze layers and sources within the received text. This approach, broadly called "Critical Talmudic Studies," is flourishing, thanks especially to the efforts of scholars at institutions like the Hebrew University, Bar Ilan, and the Jewish Theological Seminary. At JTS, the European-trained generation, including such luminaries as Saul Lieberman and David Weiss-Halivni, raised up gifted disciples. Recent attention has [End Page 197] emphasized the labors of the redactors, unnamed "Stammaim," who shaped the ultimate form of the Babylonian Talmud (Bavli). The work of Jacob Neusner, legendary in its scope, made it problematic to read a text as vast and layered as the Bavli synchronically. Early on, Neusner emphasized the shaping over time of rabbinic narratives found in multiple forms in several sources. Whereas a prior generation of scholars trusted narratives about the rabbis as reliable sources of historical and biographical information, post-Neusner writers ask different questions: How did the stories evolve? What do the stories tell us about the issues that mattered to the particular time and place in which a given version appeared? As Jeffrey L. Rubenstein puts it in his first volume, Talmudic Stories (1999), "Stories express the spiritual world of the storytellers, not the real world of the characters" (TS, p. 9). The second volume of his (so far) three-part project focused more intensively on The Culture of the Babylonian Talmud (2003), and in particular on the academies of the Stammaitic period. (The familiar references to rows of scholars, in which the novices sit in the back rows, and advance to the front rows as they progress—often retrojected to the Tannaitic period—actually describe the highly structured world of the late talmudic academies of Babylonia.) Among the current generation of academic Talmud scholars, Rubenstein has carved out a place as the expert on the rabbinic narratives about—rabbis. The goal is not to write mini-biographies, but to understand more deeply the dynamics of rabbinic culture and textual formation. Prof. Shamma Friedman (of JTS and Bar Ilan) has summarized three areas of scholarly attention: "1. The literary shape of the sugya and the historic relationship of its parts. 2. Parallel passages within the larger talmudic-midrashic corpus. 3. Manuscripts of the Talmudic text and other early textual witnesses" ["The Talmud Today" http://atranet.co.il/sf/talmud_today.pdf, p. 9]. This certainly describes part of the program followed by Rubenstein both in his earlier work and the present volume. There are alternative approaches to the material. Emanuel Levinas, for example, reads similar stories and investigates the underlying ethical implications, with little or no regard for redactional history. Rubenstein is not averse to talmudic ethics, but his primary project is the examination of the process of composition. Through close literary reading (with credit to other scholars, notably Jonah Fraenkel and Ofra Meir), comparison with parallel passages in other rabbinic sources (especially the Yerushalmi), and attention to the larger context in which the passage has been situated (by the redactors), Rubenstein aims to uncover the process of the reworking of traditions and what it teaches us about the cultural values of the Stammaitic editors. [End Page 198] Let us take one example from Rubenstein's current collection of readings. In Chapter 9 he considers the well-known passage from Menahot 29b in which Moses, on Mt. Sinai, asks God about the crowns that God is attaching to the letters of the Torah. Moses is then imagined visiting the classroom of Rabbi Akiba, said to be able to derive many halakhot from these crowns. Moses is seated behind eighteen (my text says eight—each chapter has an appendix in which Rubenstein compares major extant versions; mine is apparently from the first printed edition, Venice, 1520) rows of students and...

The Time That Returns: Speculative Temporality in S. Yizhar's 1948

A bstr Act Although he spent almost all of his artistic career in the post-1948 state of Israel, S. Yizhar hardly wrote about this era. This article explores Yizhar’s persistent return to the year of 1948 in Israel/Palestine. I suggest that this return entails the textual formation of a nonnovelistic narration of continuous expectation and deferral that rejects the present time of action and develops nonfactual, speculative temporality. This temporality is at the core of Yizhar’s “1948-time,” engaging a potential rupture in historical time and positing an active refusal of the post-1948 Israeli time of sovereignty. Examining the literary working of this speculative temporality in one passage of Yizhar’s 1949 novella “Hirbet Hiz‘ah,” I show how reading Yizhar’s work from this “1948-time” might alter the way we conceptualize the novella’s subject matter and political meaning. Ultimately, I ask what might happen if we start thinking about Hebrew literature from the vantage point of this 1948-time.

A Research Note on the Textual Formation of the “Ziyi”

A Research Note on the Textual Formation of the “Ziyi”

Twisten via heiligen. Hagiografische dialogen tussen de Gentse abdijen Sint-Pieters en Sint-Baafs, 941-1079

Debates are excellent linguistic-ethnographic targets. They are textual/discursive, they produce discourses and metadiscourses, and they result in a battery of texts that can be borrowed, quoted, echoed, vulgarized etc. In sum, they are moments of textual formation and transformation, in which minority views can be transformed into majority views and vice versa, in which group-specific discourses can be incorporated into a master text, in which a variety of discursive means are mobilized and deployed (styles, genres, arguments, claims to authority), and in which sociopolitical alliances are shaped or altered in discourse. (Jan Blommaert)l

:Educating People of Faith: Exploring the History of Jewish and Christian Communities

A much-needed addition to the emerging literature on the formative power of religious practices, Educating People of Faith creates a vivid portrait of the lived that shaped the faith of Jews and Christians in synagogues and churches from antiquity up to the seventeenth century. This significant book is the work of Jewish, Roman Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant scholars who wished to discover and describe how Jews and Christians through history have been formed in religious ways of thinking and acting. Rather than focusing solely on either intellectual or social life, the authors all use the concept of practices as they attend to the embodied, contextual character of religious formation. Their studies of religious figures, community life, and traditional such as preaching, sacraments, and catechesis are colorful, detailed, and revealing.The authors are also careful to cover the nature of religious education across all social levels, from the textual formation of highly literate rabbis and monks engaged in Scripture study to the local formation of illiterate medieval Christians for whom the veneration of saints' shrines, street performances of religious dramas, and public preaching by wandering preachers were profoundly formative. Educating People of Faith will benefit scholars and teachers desiring a fuller perspective on how lived have historically formed people in religious faith. It will also be useful to practical theologians and pastors who wish to make the resources of the past available to practitioners in the present. Contributors: John C. Cavadini Anne L. Clark Lawrence S. Cunningham Joseph Goering Robert Goldenberg Stanley Samuel Harakas Robert M. Kingdon Blake Leyerle Michael A. Signer Philip M. Soergel David C. Steinmetz John Van Engen Lee Palmer Wandel Robert Louis Wilken Elliot R. Wolfson

Héroes y villanos del Nuevo Mundo en la <i>Historia General</i> y natural de las Indias de Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés

Modern scholars analyze the chronicles of the Indies as a set of accounts, reports, ways of narrating the lived experiences in the New World, which were tinged with providentialism, mesianism and other value judgments from their rhetoric structure and judeo- Christian pastoral. The Historia by Fernandez de Oviedo (1478-1557) is a perfect example. Although the Historia contains various elements of style that are representative of a genre whose main quality has undoubtedly to do with historiography, it incorporates many allegorical and imaginative levels belonging to a literary textual formation. In this article I shall explore both the construction of a model of Christian hero, and its reverse, as literary figures in the elaboration of a imperialistic and colonial historiography.

Television and Nationalism

This article attempts to throw some light on the linkage between television and nationalism in contemporary Japan, focusing on: 1) the historical development of TV as a symbolic object in everyday life; 2) TV as a technology of time–space articulation; and 3) the textual formation of TV programs. By the late 1950s, TV sets were placed not in homes, but on street corners, where large numbers of people gathered. The symbolic meaning of the ‘collective’ nature of TV changed after the 1960s. From the early 1960s onwards, when TV entered households, it became an overarching medium linking the family with the state, defining the national consciousness and dominating people’s imaginative views of both the past and the present. This article analyzes the ideological relationship between gender, technology and nationalism in TV images through the postwar period. But TV also provides a flow of information and discursive structures for the horizons of the social imagination. Thus, the article also shows how TV broadcasting was structured around the three nationwide time zones of morning, midday and evening. Through these time zones, it was possible to link domestic memories with national history via its major programs. The stability of TV as a national medium was threatened in all these dimensions from the late 1980s. Increasingly, media became personalized, transgressive and transnational. Despite the gradual break-up of the stable position of TV in households and the national timetable constructed through broadcasting, more powerful and aggressive national times and discourses have come into being in the face of crises. In the context of this contradictory situation, the dominant central TV stations in Japan today are becoming increasingly stagnant while, on the other hand, the internet and independent video journalism are showing greater dynamism.

Eternal garden: mysticism, history, and politics at a South Asian Sufi center

FOREWORD PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 1 Sifism PART I : HISTORIOGRAPHICAL ORIENTATION: SUFISM AND ISLAM IN SOUTH ASIA Historiographies of Islam in India Religion and Empire in the Delhi Sultanate 4. The Textual Formation of Oral Teachings in the Early Chishti Order The Interpretation of the Sufi Biographical Tradition in India FROM DELHI TO THE DECCAN Burhan al-Din Gharib's Establishment and Teaching The Indian Envronment and the Question of Conversion POLITICAL RELATIONS OF THE KHULDABAD CHISHTIS Political History of the Khuldabad Shrines Khuladabad as a Sacred Center in the Local Context PART IV: CONCLUSIONS

The Semiotics of Culture and the Concept of a Text

Two tendencies are ascertainable in the development of semiotics over the past 15 years. One has been toward refinement of the initial concepts and definition of procedures of generation. The striving for precise modeling procedures has led to the creation of metasemiotics: the object of study becomes not texts as such, but models of texts, models of models, etc. The second tendency concentrates its attention on the semiotic functioning of a real text. Whereas in the first case contradiction, structural inconsistency, the accommodation of differently structured texts within single textual formation, and semantic indeterminacy are random and nonfunctional attributes that can be removed at the metalevel of text modeling, from the second standpoint they are the object of special attention. Using Saussurean terminology, we might say that in the first case it is langage that interests the investigator as a materialization of the structural laws of a langue; in the second case it is those semiotic aspects of a ...