Nicholas P. Lunn, Word-Order Variation in Biblical Hebrew Poetry: Differentiating Pragmatics and Poetics. 2006. Paternoster Biblical Monographs. Milton Keynes: Paternoster. 373 pp. + xiv, bibliography, appendices, indexes.

This article introduces the reader to the issue of verbal sequence in the poetry of the Hebrew Bible, a topic that was studied in depth as a doctoral dissertation. After noticing the peculiarities of the poetic discourse, it surveys the solutions offered to this crux interpretum to date, but concludes that these solutions are insufficient. Several limitations of such a study are assumed from the outset. We confine ourselves to the Psalter for various reasons given below. Terminologically, we resist (...) the temptation of modern terminology by making use of terms that are as neutral as possible. Methodologically, we employ Systemic Functional Grammar to describe the grammatical incidents wherein verbs are included. Lastly, the paper concludes with an overview of the potential contributions of such a study. (shrink)

I have based my psychological hypotheses on studies in perception and in personality. Research in these two areas began independently, but by the late forties the supposedly unconnected processes came to be seen as different aspects of one process. For instance, a low tolerance for perceptual ambiguity and cognitive dissonance was found to be significantly correlated with lack of emotional responsiveness, dogmatism, and authoritarianism; conversely, a high tolerance for perceptual ambiguity and cognitive dissonance was found to be significantly correlated with (...) tolerance of emotional ambivalence, openness to new experience, and a liberal world view.1 Later studies, primarily those conducted in the sixties, then established strong correlations between these findings and information-processing styles. Information processing involves three stages: first, stimuli are selected from the environment ; these stimuli are then arranged into "dimensions"; finally, if two or more dimensions result, they are compared and/or combined according to certain rules. H. M. Schroder and his colleagues have established correlations between personality styles and styles of information processing.2 For example, an intolerant personality—that is, one with a low integration index—"identifies and organizes stimuli in a fixed way, and the rules derived from existing schemata are explicit in defining this one way" . What psychologists call an "abstract personality" and identify in terms of "flexibility" or "tolerance of ambiguity"—what in literary studies is most conveniently called "negative capability"—is not necessarily characterized as lacking rules but rather as possessing a greater number of conflicting rules on a lower level which may be accommodated by rules on a higher level. · 1. See Jerome S. Bruner and David Krech, eds., Perception and Personality, 2nd ed. and Robert R. Blake and Glenn V. Ramsey, eds., Perception: An Approach to Personality . Although, as Else Frenkel-Brunswick says, "rigidity in one respect may go with flexibility in another," she also adds: "There is some indication that in the case of distinct intolerance of emotional ambivalence one may as a rule be able to locate at least some aspects of intolerance of cognitive ambiguity although these may often be more apparent on a higher level than that of perception proper" The present essay, since it is one section of a projected larger study, deals with the issues inherent in this approach in only a limited fashion. One could, for instance, quote whole essays in this branch of psychology dealing with ambiguity and point to their relevance for some aspects of literary study and the teaching of literature. Ambiguity, of course, is also a central term in New Criticism. See William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity and Ernst Kris and Abraham Kaplan, "Aesthetic Ambiguity," in Psychoanalytic Explorations in Art, ed. Kris , pp. 243-64.· 2. H. M. Schroder, M. J. Driver, and S. Streufert, "Levels of Information Processing," in Thought and Personality, ed. Peter B. Warr , pp. 174-91. All citations to this work will appear in the text. Reuven Tsur, senior lecturer in Hebrew literature at Tel-Aviv University, is the author of several books in Hebrew on medieval and modern Hebrew poetry and, in English, A Perception-Oriented Theory of Metre. (shrink)

Thus it would not be the content or meaning of a written Torah that Jeremiah would attack; rather it would be the Deuteronomic “claim to final and exclusive authority by means of writing” . Jeremiah’s problem is political rather than theological. He knows that writing is more powerful than prophecy and that he will not be able to withstand it—and he knows that the Deuteronomists know no less. As Blenkinsopp says, “Deuteronomy produced a situation in which prophecy could not continue (...) to exist without undergoing profound transformations” —that is, without ceasing to be “free prophecy,” or prophecy unbound by any text, including its own. “It might be considered misleading or flippant to say that for [Deuteronomy], as for rabbinic orthodoxy, the only good prophet is a dead prophet. But in point of fact the Deuteronomic scribes, despite their evident debt to and respect for the prophets, contributed decisively to the eclipse of the kind of historically oriented prophecy represented by Jeremiah and the emergence in due course of quite different forms of scribal prophecy” .It is at this point that we reach a sort of outer limit of biblical criticism—a threshold that scholars, with their foundations in literary criticism, their analytical attitude toward texts, and their theological concerns, are not inclined to cross. In any case, it is no accident that the political meaning of the conflict of prophecy and canon has received its most serious attention not from a biblical scholar but from a radical historian, Ellis Rivkin. In The Shaping of Jewish History, a brilliant and tendentious book, Rivkin proposes to treat the question of canon-formation and the promulgation of canonical texts of the Scriptures, not according to literary criteria but according to power criteria. For Rivkin, the production of the Hebrew Scriptures “was not primarily the work of scribes, scholars, or editors who sought out neglected traditions about wilderness experience, but of a class struggling to gain power.”23 23. Ellis Rivkin, The Shaping of Jewish History: A Radical New Interpretation , p. 30; further references to this work will be included in the text. Gerald R. Bruns is professor of English at the University of Iowa. He is the author of Modern Poetry and the Idea of Language and Inventions: Writing, Textuality, and Understanding in Literary History . The present essay is from a work in progress, Hermeneutics, Ancient and Modern. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Ancient and Modern HermeneuticsDavid HalliburtonAncient and Modern Hermeneutics, by Gerald L. Bruns; xii & 318 pp. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992, $37.50.Modern hermeneutics, Bruns explains, has mainly gone in two directions. One is toward the transcendental ground-swells of Husserl, who remains committed to idealities, as exemplified in geometry. The second direction, taken by Heidegger, Gadamer, and Bruns (not to mention Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, and (...) the Pragmatists) hews to the worldly rootedness of understanding; here each and all enjoy the capacity to comprehend—if not perfectly, at least perfectly well.Bruns divides his admirable opus into two large sections. Part One, on the Ancients, consists of essays on Socrates, Thucydides, the Hebrew Bible, allegory, the Jewish Midrash, and what may be broadly viewed as a correlative Islamaic text. He argues that Socrates’ ironic inclinations are not forensic ploys but manifestations of an authentic ontological disposition. (This ontological motif sounds throughout Bruns’s text.) Bruns’s Socrates has but to carry out the phusis that he himself is—in the undertow of which he cannot but be ironic even as, in being ironic, he cannot but be, like phusis, elusive and even impenetrable: “The point about Socrates is that we never know how to take him” (p. 32).Bruns handles ingeniously the problem of speeches that Thucydides “reported” but could not have heard. He argues that Thucydides provides a sort of simulacrum of the speeches. On this view, the historian does not attempt to report what the speakers actually said; instead he portrays implicitly the concrete historical situations (the modifiers are mine) in which orators orate: “the true author... would not be its original speaker nor its subsequent scribes but the situation that called for the speech to be made” (p. 58).In his challenging chapter on allegory, especially in Philo, Bruns approaches the former’s mystical commentary on the cherubim by problematizing familiar, restrictive distinctions. “In this case there can be no easy or gross distinction between the exoteric and the esoteric, the literal-minded and the wise....” To Philo “understanding is a form of recognition, of being turned toward and received into what before had been hidden or strange” (p. 102).Part Two, on the Moderns, treats of hermeneutic issues raised by Wordsworth [End Page 158] but even more paradigmatically by Luther; the tragic concept of experience; the question of tradition; radical hermeneutics; and the quarrel between philosophy and poetry. The journey ends in Bruns’s attempt to hypostatize an originary concept of freedom.To Bruns the liminal figure for modernity is Luther. It is a high hermeneutic moment that each of Luther’s students receives his own Bible with wide margins in which to copy the master’s—or conceivably his own—commentaries. Here Scripture is not merely grasped cognitively but is immediately, and, with full Deweyan and Diltheyan overtones, experienced. Luther for his part postulates that the text interprets itself. Concurring, and returning to the ontological motif noted above, Bruns proposes the one’s relation to a text “is ontological rather than simply exegetical. Luther’s distinction between law and gospel is a way of extending this ontological relation from the notion of a legal indictment to that of a spiritual one in which one’s self-understanding or self-identity is reconstituted by the text” (p. 146).Later Bruns deftly contrasts Hegel’s Umkehrung, the “movement toward enlightenment and the self-certainty of absolute consciousness” (p. 157), with Heidegger’s resolute refusal to appropriate or manipulate the world into which he, with everyone else, has been thrown. This attitude is somewhat akin to negative capability or wise passiveness—no English word or phrase gets it right—and requires a kind of letting-be, or letting-go. Bruns puts the matter about as well as one can, in short compass: “Thinking... is not reasoning or questioning but listening; its goal is not conceptual representation by Gelassenheit, or a letting go, releasement, and ‘openness to the mystery’” (p. 158).In his chapter on romantic hermeneutics, Bruns returns to Luther who, though stressing the empowerment of the individual reader, nonetheless regards the text as a vital force entering into and transforming the... (shrink)

Bruns lucidly depicts the distinctions and convergences between these two lines of thought by examining the works of Mallarme, Flaubert, Joyce, Beckett, and ...

In their didactic poems on fishing and chocolate, both published in 1689, two Neapolitan Jesuits digressed to record and lament a devastating 'plague' of 'hypochondria'. The poetic plagues of Niccolò Giannettasio and Tommaso Strozzi have literary precedents in Lucretius, Vergil, and Fracastoro, but it will be argued that they also have a real, contemporary significance. Hypochondria was considered to be a serious illness in the seventeenth century, with symptoms ranging from depression to delusions. Not only did our Jesuit poets claim (...) to have suffered from it, but so did prominent members of the 'Accademia degl'Investiganti', a scientific society in Naples that was at odds with both the religious and medical establishments. (shrink)