Programme
In the 1980s there was an efflorescence of books on the poetics of the
Hebrew Bible, such as Adele Berlin Poetics and Interpretation of
Biblical Narrative; Robert Alter’s two books on the art of biblical
narrative and poetry; and Meir Sternberg The Poetics of Biblical
Narrative. Since then, however, there has been rather little. More
recent work on poetics, moreover, has tended to be formalistic, to
separate structure and style from questions of meaning and
interpretation. The Deconstructive Poetics research group has two
objectives: i) to investigate how the biblical writers constructed their
literary works through the intricate interplay of sound, sensation,
argument, and symbolism; and ii) how the biblical writers simultaneously
deconstructed their poetic worlds, through phenomena such as ambiguity
and word-play. Deconstruction evokes the playfulness and
uncontrollability of writing, the tendency of every whole to fragment,
to impart the incoherence of the world. It also implies an openness to a
variety of post-structuralist approaches and agendas. Structuralism was
an heroic attempt to reduce all human cultural productions to a limited
set of logical operations and issues. Post-structuralism is both more
subjective, in that it calls attention to the plurality of readers and
reading communities, and less so, since the subject him/herself is in
question. Post-structuralism engages with the strangeness of the text,
its resistance to interpretation, its diverse voices, the text as
performance, for example of gender. Approaches to be engaged with in the
group may include parapoetics, the poetics of reception, as well as
stylistics and rhetorics.
Keywords:
Poetics, Deconstruction, Post-Structuralism, Gender, Theory