Class Summary for 09/24/09

• Read Odysseus' Scar here.
• The question was raised, why does God do things the way he does, if He is all-knowing and all-seeing?
• God loves mythos!
• Stories need conflict.
• Dr. Sexson says that we are all required to have a terrible day, and a perfect day.
• What is the lesson we learn from Joseph's brothers?
• Is there a "lesson"?
• Why does God always hurt the good people? 
• Because it makes a good story!
• Northrop Frye, and many other good teachers forever ask questions. They never give answers.
• pg. VX, "To answer is to consolidate the mental level"
• TNK
• Torah
• Nevi'im
• Ketuvim
• We break from myth and enter history in Genesis 12.
• Hubris - the greek "soulmate"; the Tower of Babel.
• Women in the bible: Woman and the snake are always found together.
• What's the deal with circumcision? 
• Covenant?
• The Alphabet of Ben-Sira
• Assignment for next class: write in the lacuna for Abraham and Issac.
  

Deconstructing the Bible

Hopefully I can make some sense here:

As I navigate the wide world of literature, I find myself delving deeper and deeper into the critical method, and what implications that may hold for my enjoyment of the literary world.

For example, recently, I have been taking a course on critical literary theory and criticism (LIT 300), and have been studying Jacques Derrida and his work in Deconstruction. You can read an outline of the theory here, but in essence, the theory sends the reader spiraling into an abyss of questions that always end the same: there is no universal meaning, and we are all trapped in an abyss of nothingness.

I am of course, being dramatic, and simplifying the theory a substantial amount, but the situation I find myself in is that the farther and farther I make my way into the critical world, the more I begin to question whether or not literature should hold the effect it has over me.

Many of my favorite works (East of Eden, Harry Potter, and a couple billion others) have affected me on a deep emotional level, which, as Northrop Frye describes in his work The Archetypes of Literature, “Casual value-judgments belong not to criticism but to the history of taste, and reflect, at best, only the social and psychological compulsions which prompted their utterance.” (Norton Ant. of Crit. Theory 1447)

I do not (yet) analyze literature on a fully critical level, while I can make an argument for or against something based on a given theory, when I place literary value on something, I am in a large part governed by how that book speaks to me, how it affects me on an emotional level, how it makes me laugh, and how it makes me cry.


So, we come to the bible, which, in the simplest terms, is a critical nightmare. I mean, come on, Derrida would look at one page, turn his nose up in the air while extinguishing his cigarette with the other and pronounce: “this work is the epitome of meaninglessness”.

I have been enjoying the bible immensely on the other hand, and partially it is because of the rather casual, visceral enjoyment I get from a mythological work. Is this correct? I don’t know. Maybe the gut feeling, the moral feeling that I get from reading the good book is the only intent or interpretation I should take.

I like to think that the most important thing I can get from literary study is a continual thirst for learning, and the devouring of great works.

Derrida be damned.

Class Summary for 09/21/09

• The three patriarchs of the Torah: Abraham, Issac, and Joseph.
• Remember, the boring parts of the bible are important too.
• Jeanne Dielmann (a movie about boring things)
• Mythology once again, we follow it because we always have; tradition.
• The Serpent
• The serpent has not always been associated with evil.
• The Epic of Gilgamesh (Sumerian)
• Gilgamesh goes after a plant that will make him immortal, he gets it, then decides to rest before eating it. A snake comes along, and eats it up, shedding its skin.
• The snake has the knowledge of good and evil.
• WISDOM!
• Gnosticism 
• Lilith, Adam's first, extrabibilical wife. 
• Lacuna
• Cain and Abel!
• Cain brought Yahweh fruits and vegetables, Abel brought firstling sheep. God likes Abel better.
• JEALOUSY!
• Cain is marked for killing his brother, becoming a "fugitive and a wanderer" (Gen 4.14)
• Other fugitives: Jean Valjean, Harrison Ford in The Fugitive.
• The story of Joseph is the first great novella.
• Thomas Mann, Joseph and His Brothers
• The Great Code: Every text is a commentary on a previous text.
• Catholics are into Angelology.

Change: Oct 1st, guest speaker, "Women in the Bible"

Class Summary for 09/17/09

• CHANGE: The final exam will be on Friday, December 18th, from 2pm-2:45pm in our normal meeting place.
• Logos, once again: the power of words to create, i.e. fact, truth, reality.
• Mythos: Myth, story, fanciful.
• One of these is "false", the other is "true".
• Mythology joins the two together, as wikipedia says, "the academic use of the term generally does not refer to truth or falsity."
• Dr. Sexson: "In effect, mythology is true stories."
• The Great Code Cracked!
• Chapter 1 focuses on language.
• Translation
• "langage" (the parts of language that are actually translatable.)
• 3 Stages (Vico)
• Age of Gods - Metaphoric/Hieroglyphic/a god/Heraclitus
• Hieroglyphic age is poetic.
• Little emphasis on separating subject and objects.
• Warrior "boasts" (Genesis 4:23)
• Vow (Judges 11:35)
• All words are concrete, intensely physical.
• Homer: soul, mind, time, courage are embodied.
• Kairos, a crucial moment in time; the "notch in an arrow" (Frye pg. 7)
• Age of Heroes - Metonymic/Hieractic/God/Plato
• Language becomes individualized, words become outward expression of thoughts. Intellect and emotion split.
• Plato is a 2nd phase thinker.
• Words are put for thought, thought is superior to nature.
• Concepts, allegories, commentary.
• Age of "Man" - Ironic Distance between subject and object/Demotic/No God/Locke, Bacon, Hume
• Began in 16th century.
• Fact gathering, language as description of an objective order.
• Extreme 3rd phase thinker dismiss all religious questions; words are words; Deconstruction. (WOO Lit 300)
• Distrusts figurative language consciousness modulates from soul to mind.
• Science takes precedence over faith.
• Kerygma
• The linguistic idiom of the bible does not coincide. (p. 29)
• Poetry keeps the metaphorical use of language alive.
•  Remember, Carl Eats Little Whiny Puppies with Gravy and Asparagus. (Creation, Exodus, Law, Wisdom, Prophecy, Gospel, and Apocalypse)
  
• Thomas Moore's Care of the Soul
•  "True itself is fact," "The truth itself is made" (Vico).
• Finally, a drawing by my 4-year-old-alter-ego, Tommy, representing the ages of language.

P.S., you can view all the class notes if you go to the sidebar, and click categories. All the notes (so far) can be found there.

Class Summary For 9/15/09

Sorry it took me a day to get these up!

• Sources of the Pentateuch (The Torah, the first 5 books)
• J - (Yahwist) - Storyteller
• Has a vivid, concrete style, anthropomorphic view of the deity. Wrote the story about Mt. Sinai.
• E - (Elohist) - "Elohim" for God.
• Located somewhere (in terms of writing style) between P and J. Uses Elohim (divine powers) for God. Begins with the story of Abraham.
  
• D - (Deuteronomist) - Wrote Deuteronomy. 
• Reflects the literary style and religious attitudes of Josiah's reform (621 BCE); insists that only one central sanctuary acceptable to Yahweh.
  
• P - (Priestly) - The statistics, rules, and ritual guy.
• R - (Redactor) - Came in and changed stuff.
  
• Once again, the documentary hypothesis rears its ugly head.
• Harold Bloom's points in the Book of J:
• Essientially a comic writer. (25)
• An "ironist" (disassembler). (25)
• King James version is "one of the handful of truly sublime styles in English".  (27)
• Her stories are not holy tales. (31)
• No heroes. Only heroines. (32)
• Talking animals, lustful Elohim, deceitful patriarchs, murder, drinking, etc. The stuff shrugged off by rabbis. (35)
• When script becomes scripture, reading is numbed by taboo and inhibition. (35)
• WTF? God's attempt to kill Moses in Exodus?
• J has no explaination.
• Etiology: Why things happen! The investigation of why things happen, from a mythological or religious standpoint.
• Mythos: "story", a net of experience.
  

The God Whisperer

So, I've been chugging along in the ol' King James for a little while now, and just the other night, I finally finished the book of Exodus. Before sinking my teeth into the statistic-driven Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, I figured I'd talk a little bit about my favorite moment in the good book so far.

It occurs in Exodus 32.7, and it is one of the most surprising moments I've experienced in the bible so far. To paraphrase: God is pissed, because the stupid Israelites cast a golden calf and are worshiping it. He says this line:


"Now let me alone, so that my wrath may burn hot against them and I may consume them; and of you I will make a great nation." (Ex 32.10)

This isn't the most remarkable part of the story, but if we can ignore the fact that God is behaving like an angsty 12-year-old, and that somehow God is going to make a great nation out of Moses (I guess he can divide asexually or something).

But here is where this becomes the most awesome moment so far:

"But Moses implored the Lord his God, and said, 'O Lord, why does your wrath burn hot against your people, whom you brought out of the land of Egypt with great power and with a mighty hand?'" (Ex 32.11)

And what does God do? Well. The God who wiped out the entire earth with a flood, the God who smites arbitrarily, the God of Sodom and Gomorrah--he changes his mind. Quote once again:


"And the Lord changed his mind about the disaster that he planned to bring on his people."

This is the most important story I've seen so far in the book, the most important parable. God, the mighty, the incredible, the creator, is wrong. He sees that what he plans to do might be a little much. He is fallible, and through others, he has seen the right (whatever that is). This is the essence of the mythology: the lesson.

Incredibly compelling stuff.

Forget the part where Moses goes down and orders his people to kill each other.

P.S. I will try to have the notes for today up later tonight.

Class Summary for 09/10/09

Well, here we go, today's class in a nutshell.


Class Discussion

• Repetitive Parallelism - Commonly used in Hebrew poetry, a technique in which one term is balanced/repeated by another (typically in the next verse)
• Vico, an Italian secular philosopher, who hypothesized the "stages of language" as
1. Metaphorical (pictures, images)
2. Metonymy (one thing stands for something else)
3. Demotic (vulgar, descriptive, ironic language)
• Vico also organized the 3 "ages" of civilization: the divine, the heroic, and the human.
• You can read more about it here (it starts in about the second paragraph)
• We talked about the Critical approach to the bible (A more scholarly, studious approach, obviously, Moses didn't write the first five books).
• And we also talked about the Traditional approach to the bible, which isn't interested in critique, more of a literal application.
• Dr. Sexson actually brought up an excellent point that there is a difference between taking the bible literally, and using it as a metaphorical tool to help us with problems in our lives, and with things that we can't explain. Awesome stuff. I believe he said, "We must relativise our traditions to furnish in a larger context."
  
• The Documentary Hypothesis:  The bible wasn't written by one person, rather a series of redactors.
• Ovid and Claude Lévi-Strauss were mentioned.
• Logos=words.

Additional Stuff

• Rio shared a link to an online King James bible: bartleby.com/108
• Here is a YouTube link to the Miserere, by The Kings College Choir. (The song is the right one, I don't know if the video is actually Roy Goodman) You can buy it off iTunes as well as an individual song (.99 for this beautiful music!).

I hope I've done well.

Psalm 51

In lieu of a longer post that I'm working on, I thought I'd share some quick impressions of Psalm 51.

To begin, I love this verse:

"Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, / and cleanse me from my sin" (Psalms 51.2)

I just love the idea of this verse. David is basically asking the Lord to cleanse him of all of him that he believes to be abhorrent in himself. I love it when a character admits that he has flaws and wishes to change.

Moving into another line I liked:

"Indeed, I was born guilty," (Psalms 51.5)''

I have a feeling this is going to come into play later, but I love me some religious guilt.

But then it kind of devolves at the end into a bunch of gobbledygook about burnt offerings. Oh well.

Genesis. Whoa.

All right. Genesis. Let's do this.

So, I'm going to focus on the stories that I found the most interesting/weird/awesome. Keep in mind, I'm not quite finished with Genesis yet, so this is just as far as I've gotten.
 

But first, some of my favorite quotes off the top of my head:
 

"God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good." (Gen. 1.31)
I should hope so.
"And the man and his wife were both naked, and were not ashamed." (Gen. 2.25)
Awesome.

Anywho, the first story that I find incredibly interesting is of course, the story of Cain and Abel (Gen. 4)

Why? Because it is so simple, and barebones in its explanation. Why does God choose Abel over Cain.  While it is alluded to that Abel gives the firstlings, and Cain only the fruit, that seems like not that big of a deal. I mean, the least God could have done is given Cain a smaller pat on the head. But where this story interests me the most is the murder. Not to be morbid, but this is the first instance of murder in the good book, so I feel that it is significant. Why? perhaps because it is an escalation of the sin of mankind, which I find very compelling. And then there's that awesome line, where Cain leaves, and settles "east of Eden" (Gen. 4-16), which just so happens to be one of my favorite books by Mr. John Steinbeck.

Second story,

Sodom and Gomorrah. An incredibly relevant text, considering the political minefield we enter every time someone decides to speak about homosexuality. But jumping around, I found the text to be rather anti-feminine (this is the bible of course), when Lot cries, "Look, I have two daughters, sodomize them instead of my guests, please. They're even virgins!" Wow, not a whole lot of sentiment there.

I also liked the part where Lot's wife is turned into a pillar of salt. God's not a big fan of the whole mercy thing.

I have read a bit farther, and will blab more later, but for now this is what was currently in my head.

First Day

WOO! First day!

Really really excited for this class, having never read the bible before. I'm really into mythology, and the bible's a big one. Should be fun! Hope I'm doing the blog thing right.