Recent literary methods have opened new possibilities in reading and understanding the logic of narratives. The Greimassian approach offers such a possibility. Though Greimas’ approach is by now accepted as part of the canon of narratology, some of its components have not yet received due attention. This is the case with his ‘veridictory square’, a diagram that applies especially to texts where oppositions such as truth-falsehood, hero-villain and subject-anti-subject are prominent themes. This article aims to demonstrate that these kinds of (...) narratives, such as Susanna, do not concern themselves with objective truth but persuasion about truth, that is, veridiction. Truth telling in those stories corresponds to manipulation, exercising a particular cognitive doing or causing to appear as true. In other words, such a manipulation of truth aims at causing people to believe. Using Greimas’ veridictory square built on opposing modalities of being and seeming, the contrast between reality and appearance, this article provides insight into the games of truth in Susanna and thus offers a new inspiring way of reading these kinds of stories. (shrink)

The structuring of the narrative with characters assigned to fulfil particular roles is often indicative of an author’s possible intent. Thus, characterisation, in a story, is not neutral about its rhetorical intent; it generally reveals cultural values that the author or editor desires to either promote or reject, within a community. Judith seems to support this claim, in relation to the issue of Jewish leadership within the narrative. In more recent years, Judith has attracted the attention of many scholars and (...) accordingly, a number of intuitive contributions have already been made to this particular area of research. However, the story is still capable of yielding far more detail concerning, inter alia, the blunders made within the Jewish religious leadership at the time. In this regard, this article attempts to uncover the real concern about the nature of Jewish leadership as encapsulated in the narrative of Judith using a Greimassian semiotic approach. Following the results from the analysis, the article contends that in the context of the narrative, Judaism not only suffered adversity from external forces but also from within, because of the deficiency of its own leadership. For this reason, an alternative leadership personified by Judith, rooted in spiritual values, was desired. (shrink)