Notes for 09-26-06
Metephors.
Not logical.
Isreal is Gods wife.
Metephorical material has been revised, edited, changed.
Types and anti-types
"Your belly is like a heap of wheat"
J's writing full of repetition of plot, and psychologically rich character development.
Kings 14:10 "Those who piss against a wall" =Men.
J's Strong women: Sarah
Rebekah
Rachael
Ziporah
Hemar

Stories of The Well: Isaac and Rebekah
Jacob and Rachael

I have been thinking lately about the bible, and how it fits into the realm of literary criticism. since I am taking lit crit this semester, I am forced to see literature in those terms. But really, looking at the bible from a literary perspective is lit crit. So, if we are annoying Dr. Sexson by wanting to know facts, history, and rules, then clearly Sexson dosen't want to take a historical approach to the bible. Neither, may I add, should faith based religious people, since archeology proves that Noah's Arc couldn't have existed (Even though they do).

So how you recieve the bible depends on how you read it... And perhaps this class is jumping around in different literary theories.
So here are some questions we should be asking ourselves: How do I read the bible? What am I looking for? What do I take notice of? What bothers me? What interests me?

The following is the beginning of my own attempt to understand the different kinds of Literary criticism.

Strucuralism/Deconstructionism: the belief that texts work within certain structures. Structuralism emphasizes that elements of culture must be understood in terms of their relationship to the entire system
syntax and lexicon.

Levi Strauss:
"A general theory of the way in wich the exchange and circulation of women between families is used to knit cultures together."
"Another aspect of culture is used for exchange and circulation: language."
"Cultures with complex kinship structures, which gave the individual a smaller number of marital choices,tended to speak languages with complex syntax and a small lexicon, while cultures(like our own)with simple kinship structures, which give the individual a vast number of marital choices, tend to speak languages with simple syntax and a large lexicon."
-Richter

Syntax: the study of the rules, or "patterned relations" that govern the way words combine to form phrases and phrases to form sentences.

Lexicon: When linguists study the lexicon, they study such things as what words are, how the vocabulary in a language is structured, how people use and store words, how they learn words, the history and evolution of words, types of relationships between words as well as how words were created.
(Wikipedia)

Strauss focused on myths to do his research, "Myths are the way of the 'Savage mind'-not the minds of savages, but the untamed mind within all of us-gives order to the world." (richter pg.823)

Classical criticism- Lots of old guys: Plato, Aristotle, Plontinus, Wordsworth, Kant, etc...
Plato believed in the world of ideals, and focused his philosopy on ideas of imitation. He thought poetry was worthless unless it was an ode to the Gods, or if it did something to help society. Plato believed people like Homer to be frauds since they wrote about things they didn't expirience. He thought the world lived as copies of copies.

New Criticism
Formal criticism
Reader response theory
Marxist criticism
psychoanalytical theory
New historicism and cultural studies
Feminist literary criticism
Gender studies and Queer theory
Post colonialism and ethnic studies