63 Result(s)
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Chapter
On Reader Responsibility: An Introduction
Contemporary theories of reading have been heavily determined by new criticism, Russian formalism, and structuralism, and their influence continues, variously, in New historicism, post-structuralism, as also i...
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Only Irresponsible People would go into the Desert for Forty Days: Jim Crace’s Quarantine Or the Diary of another Madman
Jim Crace’s novel Quarantine (1997) revisits the story of the temptations of Jesus in the wilderness. It does not adhere closely to the gospel narratives, yet it has uncanny resonances with Scripture, with the st...
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Samuel Beckett’s Use of the Bible and the Responsibility of the Reader
Samuel Beckett’s use of the Bible might seem quite inconsistent, ambiguous, and irresponsible, especially when seen from a Christian point of view, for the plethora of allusions and direct references to the Bi...
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The “Indian” Character of Modern Hindi Drama: Neo-Sanskritic, Pro-Western Naturalistic, or Nativistic Dramas?
This essay deals with the notion of “Indian” character of naturalistic Hindi drama, as revealed in the plays of Mohan Rakeś (1925–1972), Bhuvaneśvar (1912–1957), and Upendranath Aśk (1910–1996) who wrote in th...
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Bible and Ethics: Moral Formation and Analogical Imagination
The use of the Bible in ethics is comparable with the way in which literature and film are used in ethics.1 Every great work of literature, film, or drama invites us into an alternative reality where new possibil...
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Revolting Fantasies: Reviewing the Cinematic Image as Fruitful Ground for Creative, Theological Interpretations in the Company of Julia Kristeva
Are the movies good for us? In her book, Intimate Revolt: The Powers and Limits of Psychoanalysis, Julia Kristeva (2002a) defends what she calls a revolutionary culture whose mode and purpose is a liberating proc...
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Dialogue in Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj or Indian Home Rule or the Reader as Truth-Seeker
This essay1 examines Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj, particularly its dialogic form, in order to highlight several theoretical implications for a study of the literary reader. The Gandhian reader is, above everything else,...
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Some Dilemmas of an Ethics of Literature
What can an ethical approach to literature mean, and how does it relate to the autonomy art and literature have achieved through the nineteenth and twentieth century? The current “ethical turn” goes from fairl...
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The Ethics of Biblical Interpretation: Rhetoricizing the Foundations
Historically, biblical ethics dealt with the question of what the Bible has to say about right living and moral decision making. Given that the same texts yield a variety of ethical stances, the basis upon whi...
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Responsibly Performing Vulnerability: Salman Rushdie’s Fury and Edgar Laurence Doctorow’s City of God
Salman Rushdie’s novel Fury (2002) presents modernity as intrinsically religious. Fury creatively twists and reverses the Koranic story of Abraham (Ibrahim) sacrificing his son by presenting its main character Ma...
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On Trial: Mikhail Bakhtin and Abram Tertz’s Address to “God”
The literary work of Mikhail Bakhtin and Andrey Sinyavsky (also known as Abram Tertz) can be fully understood in the light of their critical responses to the Soviet doctrine of socialist realism, which was off...
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Film and Apocryphal Imitation of the Feminine—Judith of Bethulia
Shot on location in 1913 in Chatsworth, California, Judith of Bethulia was released in 1914. The film was produced and directed by the legendary American producer D.W. Griffith and starred the actress Blanche Swe...
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The Playwright, the Novelist, and the Comedian: A Case Study in Audience Responsibility
The starting point for this essay is formed by a series of events that took place in the Netherlands at the end of the twentieth century. When in the 1980s a Dutch theater group wanted to perform Rainer Werner...
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Literature as Resistance: Hannah Arendt on Storytelling
In The Origins of Totalitarianism Hannah Arendt expresses her distrust of literature, in Eichmann in Jerusalem she unequivocally states that one man will always be left alive to tell the story. What accounts for ...
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Derrida on Rousseau: Deconstruction as Philosophy of Logic
In the lengthy reading of Rousseau which makes up the central portion of Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatolog. there is much that should interest philosophers of logic (Derrida 1976). Just recently some writers — Gra...
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Modularity, Nativism, and Reference-Fixing: On Chomsky’s Internalist Assumptions
Noam Chomsky’s objections to the Kripke/Putnam externalist or causal theory of reference have been developed in various books and articles over the past two decades (see for instance Chomsky 1986, 1988, 1992, ...
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The Perceiver’s Share (2): Deconstructive Musicology and Cognitive Science
It is now more than twenty years since Joseph Kerman published his much-cited essay ‘How we got into analysis, and how to get out’ (Kerman 1980). Significantly enough, it appeared in the US journal Critical Inqui...
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Introduction
This volume brings together a number of chapters which I should happily describe as ‘inter-disciplinary’ if that term had not acquired — to my mind at least — certain negative or worrisome connotations. These ...
