The literary turn and new testament theology: Detour or new direction?

Journal of Religion

Volumn 76, Issue 2, 1996, Pages 250-275

  Donahue, John R ^a  

^a Jesuit School of Theology   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60950266928     PISSN: 00224189     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/489791     Document Type: Article

References (168)

1. Gerhard F. Hasel, Old Testament Theology: Basic Issues in the Current Debate, rev. ed. (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1991), pp. 22-24.
2. For kerygmatic theology, see John Barton and Robert Morgan, Biblical Interpretation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 104, 115-25;
3. on von Rad, see Gerhard von Rad, The Problem of the Hexateuch and Other Essays (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966), pp. 1-78
4. and Hasel, pp. 115, 145-55;
5. on the "salvation history" school of New Testament research, see esp. Oscar Cullmann, Christ and Time: The Primitive Christian Conception of Time and History, rev. ed. (London: SCM, 1962; Philadelphia: Westminster, 1964)
6. and Salvation in History (London: SCM; New York: Harper & Row, 1967).
7. H. G. Reventlow (Problems of Old Testament Theology in the Twentieth Century [Philadelphia: Fortress, 1985], p. 101) calls Cullmann's works "the clearest overall view of a system of salvation history."
8. At the time of Bultmann, "literary criticism" was used primarily to describe the detection of sources behind a given document. The term in English has come to embrace virtually every approach used to understand better ancient or modern texts. Nonetheless, Bultmann was well versed in classical rhetoric and was in dialogue with the nonbiblical literary criticism of his time, especially in the study of folklore. Also in the final part of Rudolf Bultmann, The History of the Synoptic Tradition (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), pp. 347-400, "The Editing (Redaktion) of the Traditional Material," he noted the ways in which the Evangelists edited and incorporated the sayings and narrative material into their Gospels-thus anticipating redaction criticism.
9. Rudolf Bultmann, "Autobiographical Reflections," in Existence and Faith: Shorter Writings of Rudolf Bultmann, ed. Schubert Ogden (New York: Meridien, 1960), pp. 283-88;
10. P.J. Cahill, "The Theological Significance of Rudolf Bultmann," Theological Studies 38 (1977): 231-36 (on biographical data).
11. Rudolf Bultmann, Theologie des Neuen Testaments (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1948-53);
12. English translation, The Theology of the New Testament, 2 vols., trans. John Marsh (New York: Charles Scribners' Sons, 1951-55).
13. Martin Dibelius, From Tradition to Gospel, rev. 2d ed. (New York: Scribners, 1934);
14. Karl Ludwig Schmidt, Der Rahmen der Geschichte Jesu (Berlin: Töpelmann, 1919).
15. Bultmann, History of the Synoptic Tradition (1st German ed., 1921).
16. Theology, 2:237 (Bultmann's emphasis).
17. See Henrikus Boers, What Is New Testament Theology? Fortress Guides to Biblical Scholarship (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1979);
18. John R. Donahue, "The Changing Shape of New Testament Theology," Theological Studies 50 (June 1989): 314-35
19. reprinted in Horizons in Biblical Theology: An International Dialog Il (1989): 1-30;
20. Heikki Räisänen, Beyond New Testantent Theology (London: SCM; Philadelphia: Trinity Press International, 1990).
21. Edward Farley, The Fragility of Knowledge: Theological Education in the Church and the University (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1988).
22. The Fragility of Knowledge: Theological Education in the Church and the UniversityIbid., p. 34.
23. For helpful surveys of the new literary criticism, see Janice Capel Anderson and Stephen D. Moore, eds., Mark and Method: New Approaches in Biblical Studies (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992);
24. Elizabeth Struthers Malbon and Edgar McKnight, eds., The New Literary Criticism and the New Testament, Journal for the Study of the New Testament, suppl. ser. 109 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1994);
25. Elizabeth A. Castelli, Stephen D. Moore, Gary A. Phillips, and Regina M. Schwartz, eds., The Postmodern Bible: The Bible and Culture Collective (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995): this important work is a multiauthored collection of essays on the various dimensions of postmodern biblical criticism. The essays, however, appear without specific attribution but as the collaborative work of the "culture collective" (pp. 15-19).
26. Norman Perrin, "The Wredestrasse Becomes the Hauptstrasse: Reflections on the Reprinting of the Dodd Festschrift," Journal of Religion 46 (1966): 298.
27. Norman Perrin, What Is Redaction Criticism? Fortress Guides to Biblical Scholarship (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1969), p. 1.
28. Willi Marxsen, review of Die Mitte der Zeit, by Hans Conzelmann, Monatsschrift für Pastoraltheologie 6 (1954): 254.
29. Willi Marxsen, Mark the Evangelist: Studies on the Redaction History of the Gospel, trans, into English by James Boyce et al. (Nashville: Abingdon, 1969).
30. Günther Bornkamm, Gerhard Barth, and Heinz-Joachim Held, Tradition and Interpretation in Matthew, trans. Percy Scott (1st German ed., Neukirchen: Neukirchen Verlag, 1960; Philadelphia: Westminster, 1963);
31. Joachim Rohde, Rediscovering the Teaching of the Evangelists, trans. Dorothea Barton (Hamburg: Furche Verlag, 1966; Philadelphia: Westminster, 1968). I have presented elsewhere a more lengthy survey of the development and transformation of redaction criticism, parts of which are restated here;
32. see John R. Donahue, "Redaction Criticism: Has the Hauptstrasse Become a Sackgasse?" in Struthers Malbon and McKnight, eds., pp. 27-57.
33. Norman Perrin, "The Interpretation of the Gospel of Mark," Interpretation 30 (1976): 128.
34. Mary Ann Tolbert, Sowing the Gospel: Mark's World in Literary-Historical Perspective (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1989), p. 23.
35. Helen Gardner, "The Poetry of St. Mark," in her The Business of Criticism (Oxford: Clarendon, 1959), p. 103.
36. Amos Wilder, The Language of the Gospel: Early Christian Rhetoric, rev. ed. with new preface (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971).
37. Arnos Wilder, Jesus' Parables and the War of Myths (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1982), p. 15.
38. Tolbert, Sowing the Gospel, p. 30.
39. Stephen D. Moore, Literary Criticism and the Gospels: The Theoretical Challenge (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989), p. 10.
40. Robert Spivey, "Structuralism and Biblical Studies: The Uninvited Guest," Interpretation 28 (1974): 133-45.
41. Elizabeth Struthers Malbon, "Narrative Criticism: How Does the Story Mean?" in Anderson and Moore, eds., pp. 25-26.
42. Daniel Patte, What Is Structural Exegesis? Fortress Guides to Biblical Scholarship (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1976)
43. The Gospel according to Matthew: A Structural Commentary on Matthew's Faith (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1986)
44. and Structural Exegesis for New Testament Critics (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1989).
45. Elizabeth Struthers Malbon, Narrative Space and Mythic Meaning in Mark (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1986;
46. reprint, Sheffield: Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Press, 1991);
47. Bernard Brandon Scott, Hear Then the Parable: A Commentary on the Parables of Jesus (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1989).
48. Moore, p. 180.
49. Seymour A. Chatman, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1979);
50. Vincent Leitch, American Literary Criticism from the Thirties to the Eighties (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), p. 251.
51. Struthers Malbon, "Narrative Criticism: How Does the Story Mean?" in Anderson and Moore, eds., p. 24.
52. Especially influential is Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction, 2d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).
53. Jack D. Kingsbury, Matthew as Story (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1988);
54. David Rhoads and Donald Michie, Mark as Story: An Introduction to the Narrative of a Gospel (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1982);
55. Mark A. Powell, What Is Narrative Criticism? Fortress Guides to Biblical Scholarship (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1990);
56. Robert C. Tannehill, The Narrative Unity of Luke Acts: A Literary Interpretation, 2 vols. (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1990-91)
57. For an extensive list of literary studies and the Gospels, see Mark A. Powell, with the assistance of Cecille G. Gray and Melissa C. Curtis, The Bible and Modem Literary Criticism, Bibliographies and Indexes in Religious Studies, no. 22 (New York: Greenwood, 1992), esp. pp. 254-339.
58. Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974);
59. Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980);
60. Jane Tompkins, Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-structuralism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980);
61. Robert M. Fowler, Let the Reader Understand: Reader Response Criticism and the Gospel of Mark (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991);
62. and "Figuring Mark's Reader: Reader Response Criticism," in Anderson and Moore, eds., pp. 50-83.
63. Murray Krieger, A Window to Criticism (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1964), pp. 3-4.
64. Norman Petersen, Literary Criticism for New Testament Critics (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1978), p. 19 (Petersen's emphasis).
65. Sandra M. Schneiders, The Revelatoiy Text: Interpreting the New Testament as Sacred Scripture (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1992), p. 113.
66. post structuralists claim to know only the impossibility of this knowledge." David Tracy (Plurality and Ambiguity: Hermeneutics, Religion and Hope [San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987], p. 54) observes that structuralists study "the system of signs (langue) that makes all speech possible, not the actual use of speech by particular speakers (parole)," while "deconstructionists challenge all claims to uncovering the fully systemic character of any language by insisting on the implications of the fact that no system can adequately account for its own ineradicably differential nature" (p. 56).
67. Mark C. Taylor, Deconstructing Theology (New York: Crossroad; Chico, Calif: Scholars, 1982), p. xix.
68. Joseph Adamson, "Deconstruction," in Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory: Approaches, Scholars, Tenus, ed. Irena R. Makaryk (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), p. 29;
69. see also Jonathan Arac, Wlad Godzich, and Wallace Martin, eds., The Yale Critics: Deconstruction in America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983). The bestknown Yale critics are the late Paul deMan (d. 1983) and J. Hillis Miller.
70. See also David Lehman, The Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man (New York: Poseidon, 1991) for a critical narrative of the history of deconstruction in the United States and the events surrounding the discovery and publication of Paul de Man's youthful pro-Nazi writings in 1987.
71. Kevin Hart, in his excellent study (The Trespass of the Sign: Deconstntction, Theology and Philosophy [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989]), writes: "Over the past twenty-years or so the writings of Jacques Derrida have acted like an intellectual yeast. Very few people have actually read such large, imposing tomes as Of Grammatology, Dissemination, and Glas, yet everyone, it seems, has been influenced by what they say" (p. ix).
72. I would claim minimal expertise on deconstruction, and my comments rely heavily on secondary sources which led me frequently to Derrida's texts. Of special help were: Culler, Christopher Norris, Deconstruction: Theory and Practice (London: Methuen, 1982);
73. A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds, ed. with introduction and notes by Peggy Kamuf (New York: Columbia UniversityPress, 1991);
74. J. Douglas Kneale, "Deconstruction," in The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism, ed. Michael Groden and Martin Kreiswirth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), pp. 185-92;
75. Moore (n. 31 above), pp. 131-70, and Poststructuralism and the New Testament: Derrida and Foucault at the Fool of the Cross (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1994), pp. 11-41, 85-94;
76. Castelli et al., eds., pp. 119-48 (on poststructuralist criticism); Jean-Michel Rabaté, "Derrida, Jacques," in The Johns Hopkins Guide, pp. 197-201;
77. Herman Rapaport, "French Theory and Criticism: 1968 and After," in Groden and Kreiswirth, eds., pp. 304-12.
78. On deconstruction as primarily in the province of philosophy, see Rodolphe Gasché, The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986)
79. and Inventions of Difference: On Jacques Derrida (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994). Since Derrida continues to write and lecture in a prolific manner, any generalizations about his project will necessarily be tentative.
80. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, ed. Charles Bally et al. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959).
81. Bernard Harrison, Inconvenient Fictions: Literature and the Limits of Theory (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1991), p. 28.
82. Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke and Proust (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979), p. 249
83. as cited in Moore, Literary Criticism and the Gospels, p. 179.
84. citing Barbara Johnson, "Barbara Johnson," in Criticism in Society: Interviews with Jacques Derrida, Northrop Frye, Harold Bloom, Geoffrey Hartmann, Frank Kermode, Edward Said, Barbara Johnson, Frank Lentricchia, and J. Hillis Miller, conducted and introduced by Imre Salusinszky (New York: Methuen, 1987), p. 164. In introducing her translation of Derrida's Dissemination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), Johnson also notes: "The deconstruction of a text does not proceed by random doubt or generalized skepticism, but by the careful teasing out of warring forces of signification within the text itself. If any thing is destroyed in a deconstructive reading, it is not meaning but the claim to unequivocal domination of one mode of signifying over another" (p. xiv).
85. Castelli et al., eds., p. 122.
86. Derrida himself warns against considering deconstruction a method. See, e.g., his "A Letter to a Japanese Friend," in Kamuf, ed., p. 273: "Deconstruction is not a method and cannot be transformed into one. Especially if the technical and procedural significations of the words are stressed. It is true that in certain circles (university or cultural, especially in the United States) the technical and methodological 'metaphor' that seems necessarily attached to the very word 'deconstruction' has been able to seduce or lead astray."
87. See also "The Time Is Out of Joint," in Deconstruction Is/In America: A New Sense of the Political, ed. Anselm Haverkamp (New York: New York University Press, 1995), p. 17: "I have often had occasion to define deconstruction as that which is - far from a theory, a school, a method, even a discourse, still less a technique that can be appropriated-at bottom what happens or comes to pass [ce qui arrive]'' (Derrida's emphasis). Kevin Hart, pp. 107-9, notes that the term "deconstruction" is not univocal and that in the course of time it has become "thoroughly overdetermined."
88. Derek Attridge ("Singularities, Responsibilities: Derrida, Deconstruction and Literary Criticism," in Critical Encounters: Reference and Responsibility in Deconstructive Writing, ed. Cathy Caruth and Deborah Esch [New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers UniversityPress, 1995], esp. pp. 107-14) offers a fine description of Derrida's understanding of "literature."
89. Diane Elam, Feminism and Deconstruction: Ms. en Abyme (New York: Routledge, 1994);
90. Barbara Johnson, World of Difference (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987)
91. "Gender Theory and the Yale School," in Speaking of Gender, ed. Elaine Showalter (New York: Routledge, 1989), pp. 45-55
92. "Deconstruction, Feminism and Pedagogy," in Teaching Literature: What Is Needed Now, ed. James Enell and David Perkins (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UniversityPress, 1988), pp. 67-72
93. and The Wake of Deconstruction, Bucknell Lectures in Literary Theory (Oxford and Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1994).
94. See esp. Fred Burnett, "Postmodern Biblical Exegesis: The Eve of Historical Criticism," Semeia 51 (1990): 51-80;
95. David Jobling, "Writing the Wrongs of the World: The Deconstruction of the Biblical Text in the Context of Liberation Theologies," Semeia 51 (1990): 81-118;
96. Moore, Literary Criticism and the Gospels, pp. 131-70;
97. Gary A. Phillips, "Exegesis as Critical Practice: Reclaiming History and Text from a Postmodern Perspective," Semeia 51 (1990): 7-49.
98. For "assorted examples" of such studies see, Castelli et al., eds., p. 130, n. 9.
99. Stephen D. Moore, Mark and Luke in Poststrucluralisi Perspective (New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 1992)
100. In reviewing the former work, John Drury comments (John Drury, review of Mark and Luke in Poststructuralist Perspective, by Stephen Moore, Journal of Theological Studies 44 [1993]: 314):
101. "He [Moore] serves up slabs of Derrida, frequently invokes Finnegans Wake, puns relentlessly under the rubric of Freud's Interpretation of Dreams, and shocks the bourgeoisie with hit-and-miss scatological references." While intriguing, Moore's work lacks the kind of respectful and powerful engagement with religious texts found in Phillips's essay "The Ethics of Reading Deconstructively" and in a recent work of Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Willis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), esp. pp. 58-115, on Gen. 22:1-19, the "sacrifice" of Isaac, and on sections of the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 6).
102. Hans Dieter Betz, Galatians: A Commentary on Paul's Letter to the Churches in Galatia, Her- .- meneia (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1979).
103. Some representative works of Wilhelm Wuellner are: "Greek Rhetoric and Pauline Argumentation," in Early Christian Literature and the Classical Intellectual Tradition: In Honorem Robert M. Grant, ed. William Schoedel and Robert L. Wilken, Théologie Historique 53 (Paris: Beauchesne, 1979), pp. 177-88
104. "Where Is Rhetorical Criticism Taking Us?" Catholic Biblical Quarterly 49 (1987): 448-63
105. and "Rhetorical Criticism and Its Theory in Culture-Critical Perspective: The Narrative Rhetoric of John 11," in Text and Interpretation: New Approaches to the Criticism of the New Testament, ed. P.J. Martin and J. H. Petzer, New Testament Tools and Studies 15 (Leiden: Brill, 1991), pp. 171-85.
106. Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, "The Followers of the Lamb: Visionary Rhetoric and Social-Political Situation," in Discipleship in the New Testament, ed. F. Segovia (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984), pp. 144-165
107. "Rhetorical Situation and Historical Reconstruction in 1 Corinthians," New Testament Studies 33 (1987): 386-403
108. Revelation: Vision of a Just World (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991), pp. 1-37.
109. Vernon K. Robbins, Jesus the Teacher: A Socio-Rhetorical Interpretation of Mark, 2d ed. with a new introduction (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992)
110. "The Reversed Contextualization of Psalm 22 in the Markan Crucifixion: A Socio-Rhetorical Analysis," in The Four Gospels 1992: Festschrift Frans Neirynck, ed. F. Van Segbroeck, C. M. Tuckett, G. van Belle, and J. Verheyden, 3 vols. (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1992), 2:1161-83
111. and "Socio-Rhetorical Criticism: Mary, Elizabeth and the Magnificat as a Test Case," in Struthers Malbon and McKnight, eds. (n. 16 above), pp. 164-209.
112. Robbins, "Socio-Rhetorical Criticism," p. 166.
113. New Critics and New Criticism describe the movement dominant from the 1930s to the 1950s, associated with (among others) Cleanth Brooks, Kenneth Burke and William Wimsatt. It was in reaction to an older "historism" in literary criticism and called for a detailed study of specific literary texts, mainly poetry, called "close reading" or "practical criticism." It rejected the "intentional fallacy" (judging works on authorial intent) and the "affective fallacy" (the effect of a work on readers); see William Wimsatt, The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1954);
114. Gabriel Fackre, "Narrative Theology: An Overview," Interpretation 37 (1983): 343.
115. David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism (New York: Crossroad, 1981), pp. 99-153 (on the classic), pp. 275-81, 307-9 (on narrative).
116. See also Stephen Crites, "The Narrative Quality of Experience," Journal of the American Academy of Religion 39 (1971): 291-311;
117. Amos Wilder, Early Christian Rhetoric: The Language of the Gospel (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), pp. 56-57.
118. John Carlos Rowe, "Postmodernist Studies," in Redrawing the Boundaries: The Transformation of English and American Literary Studies, ed. Stephen Greenblatt and Giles Gunn (New York: Modern Language Association, 1992), p. 180.
119. Jeffrey T. Nealon, "The Discipline of Deconstruction," Proceedings of the Modern Language Association of America 107 (1992): 1266
120. reproduced with slight changes in his Double Reading: Postmodernism after Deconstruction (Ithaca, N.Y., and London: Cornell UniversityPress, 1993), pp. 22-49.
121. Greenblatt and Gunn, eds., pp. 1, 3.
122. Jeffrey N. Cox and Larry J. Reynolds, "Introduction: The Historicist Enterprise," in New Historical Literary Study: Essays on Reproducing Texts Representing History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 3.
123. Jonathan Hart, "New Historicism: Taking History into Account," Ariel (Calgary) 22 (1991): 93.
124. Stephen J. Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).
125. Important surveys and discussions of new historicism are: Hunter Cadzow, "New Historicism," in Groden and Kreiswirth, eds., pp. 534-40;
126. Cox and Reynolds, pp. 1-38;
127. Laurence Lerner, "Against Historicism," New Literary History 24 (1993): 273-92;
128. Aram Veeser, ed., The New Historicism (New York: Routledge, 1989), esp. pp. i-xvi;
129. Aram Veeser, "The New Historicism," in The New Historicism Reader, ed. Aram Veeser (New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 1-32.
130. Cadzow, p. 535.
131. See esp. The introduction to Stephen J. Greenblatt, Learning to Curse: Essays in Early-Modem Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 1-15
132. and "Toward a Poetics of Culture," in ibid., pp. 146-60.
133. See also, Lee Patterson "Introduction: Critical Historicism and Medieval Studies," in Literary Practice and Social Change in Britain, 1380-1530, ed. Lee Patterson (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 1-14, who proposes "critical historicism" in place of "New Historicism." Though the new historicism began with discussion of English Renaissance literature, it quickly branched out to include nineteenth-century American literature and medieval studies.
134. Greenblatt, Learning to Curse, p. 1.
135. see Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977).
136. On the relation of deconstruction to the new historicism, see Joseph Litvak, "Back to the Future: A Review Article on the New Historicism, Deconstruction and Nineteenth-Century Fiction," Texas Studies in Literature and Language 30 (1988): 120-49. In Learning to Curse, pp. 3-4, 8, in addition to the academic influences on his approach, Greenblatt mentions the influence of his "earliest recollections of 'having an identity' or 'being a self" as "bound up with story telling," especially his father's "narrative impulse," which was "a strategic way of turning disappointment, anger, rivalry and a sense of menace into comic pleasure - a way of reestablishing the self on the site of its threatened loss," along with an early "fascination with figures of estrangement."
137. citation at p. 164.
138. This essay is reproduced in Veeser, ed., The New Historicism, pp. 1-14.
139. Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations, p. 1.
140. quoting Walter Cohen, "Political Criticism of Shakespeare," in Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology, ed. Jean E. Howard and Marion F. O'Connor (New York and London: Methuen, 1987), pp. 33-34.
141. Brian Rosenberg, "Historicizing the New Historicism: Understanding the Past in Criticism and Fiction," Modern Language Quarterly 50 (1989): 376.
142. Greenblatt, introduction to Learning to Curse, pp. 13-14: "One of the principal achievements of post-structuralism has been to problematize the distinction between literary and non-literary text, to challenge the stable difference between the fictive and the actual, to look at discourse not as a transparent glass through which we glimpse reality but as the creator of what Barthes has called the 'reality effect.'"
143. See also Brook Thomas, The New Historicism and Other Old Fashioned Topics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991), p. 155.
144. See eSp Greenblatt, "The Poetics of Culture," in his Learning to Curse, pp. 157-58
145. Greenblatt, "Introduction," Genre 15 (1982):5, calls the older history "monological";
146. "Local knowledge" is a reference to Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge (New York: Basic, 1983).
147. See Vincent P. Pecora, "The Limits of Local Knowledge," in Veeser, ed., The New Historicism, pp. 243-76, for an extended critique of this concept.
148. See eSp Joel Fineman "The History of the Anecdote: Fiction and Fiction," in Veeser, ed., The New Historicism, pp. 49-76. Fineman makes the intriguing claim that Thucydides is "the first new historicist" (p. 50) and announced a program to study the form and history of the anecdote, which remains incomplete due to his early death.
149. See also Frank Lentricchia, Ariel and the Police: Michel Foucault, William James, Wallace Stephens (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), pp. 3-5. Anecdotes function much like the paradigm or its recently discussed relative, chreia, in classical New Testament form criticism.
150. For an appropriation of Foucault, see Elizabeth A. Castelli, Imitating Paul: A Discourse of Power, Literary Currents in Biblical Interpretation (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox 1991), esp. pp. 48-49.
151. For additional differences between the new and old historicism, see Herbert Lindenburger, "Toward (and after) a New History in Literary Study," in his The History in Literature: On Value, Genre, Institutions (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), pp. 189-210. Lindenberger notes the following contrasts: the stress on the detachment and self-effacement of the older history vs. The awareness of the self-involvement of new historians; the difference between what is original and relevant in the old and new history: the former stressing factual matter surrounding the word of the author, and the latter, while making use of massive data, e.g., reprints of archival materials and biographical detail, describe as original and relevant new connections between cultural productions of the past as well as new ways of redescribing them; and the fact that new historians are more concerned with the social and anthropological contexts of texts from the past as well as with intertextual relationships, "not simply, as in the older history-the study of a particular writer's reading habits, but the discovery of a larger network of texts that rethink and rewrite one another over considerable stretches of time" (p. 200).
152. Krister Stendahl, "Biblical Theology, Contemporary," in The Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible, George A. Buttwick et al., eds., 4 vols. (Nashville: Abingdon, 1962), 1:418-32.
153. For earlier critiques of Stendahl's position, see Avery Dulles, "Response to Krister Stendahl's Method in Theology," in The Bible in Modern Scholarship, ed. J. P. Hyatt (Nashville: Abingdon, 1965), pp. 210-16;
154. and Ben C. Ollenburger, "What Krister Stendahl 'Meant' - a Normative Critique of 'Descriptive Biblical Theology,'" Horizons in Biblical Theology 8 (1986): 61-98.
155. Mary Ann Tolbert, "The Gospel in Greco-Roman Culture," in The Book and the Text: The Bible and Literary Theory, ed. Regina Schwartz (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), pp. 258-75, offers a fine appropriation of the new historicism which focuses on the "rootless, at a loss, and restlessly searching people" who welcomed both the Hellenistic novel and the Gospels (p. 267).
156. Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973)
157. and "The Question of Narrative in Contemporary Theory," History and Theory 23 (1984): 1-33.
158. In reacting to the new historicism, White ("New Historicism: A Comment," in Veeser, ed., The New Historicism, pp. 301-2) observes that they have advanced the notion of "historical poetics" and have discovered "that there is no such thing as a specifically historical approach to the study of history, but a variety of such approaches as there are positions on the current ideological spectrum."
159. P. R. Keifert, "Interpretive Paradigms: A Proposal Concerning New Testament Christology," Semeia 30 (1985): 202.
160. Some helpful overviews are: Bengt Holmbert, Sociology and the New Testament- An Appraisal (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1990);
161. John H. Elliott, What Is Social-Scientific Criticism? For- tress Guides to Biblical Scholarship (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993)
162. and "Social Science Criticism of the New Testament: More on Methods and Models," Semeia 35 (1986): 1-33;
163. Bruce Malina, Christian Origins and Cultural Anthropology (Atlanta: John Knox, 1986);
164. Jerome Neyrey, ed., The Social World of Luke-Acts: Models for Interpretation (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 1991).
165. William Wrede, "The Task and Methods of 'New Testament Theology,"' in The Nature of New Testament Theology, ed. Robert Morgan, Studies in Biblical Theology, 2d ser., vol. 25 (Naperville, Ill.: Allenson, 1973), pp. 68-116;
166. Räisänen (n. 12 above). See also N. T. Wright, Christian Origins and the Question of God, vol. 1., The New Testament and the People of God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1989), pp. 5-143, who, in this first volume of a proposed five-volume project, envisions a New Testament theology that integrates philosophy, history, literary study, and the description of early Christian worldviews.
167. Räisänen, p. 129.
168. and "Between Jerusalem and Athens: The Changing Shape of Catholic Biblical Scholarship," in Hermes and Athena: Biblical Exegesis and Philosophical Theology, ed. Eleonore Stump and Thomas P. Finn (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993), pp. 285-313.