English 389: Literature of the English Bible
11:10-12:25 TR, Spring 2007
R. M. Liuzza
Department of English
University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Phone: (865) 974-6970
Office: 510 McClung
Email: rliuzza@utk.edu
This page: http://web.utk.edu/~rliuzza/389/index.php
Whatever else it may be, the Bible is a powerful work of literature, and in this class we will try to understand the Bible by using the tools and practices of literary criticism. Our perspective is not theological or devotional but historical and analytical—the class is not about the truth of the Bible, but about its style, structure, and history.
The Bible is really an anthology (its name comes from the Greek plural ta biblia, ‘the books’); it contains a broad collection of writings produced over many centuries, including histories, genealogies, letters, laws, instructions for rituals, prayers, proverbs, songs, prophetic messages, lists, archival data, and other genres. Because our time is limited, we will focus on only one book of the Bible, the book of Genesis. We will consider its origins, its development, and the history of its interpretation, but our primary work will be to understand Genesis as a narrative: a story of sibling rivalry and violence, homelessness and childlessness, jealousy and anger, aging and coming of age, fidelity and betrayal. We will examine the basic elements of narrative such as character, setting, plot, and point of view, and the literary devices used by the authors of the Bible; our reading will ask basic questions about how and why these stories are told—their functions in different cultural contexts, their meanings to different audiences, the ways in which readers have interpreted, understood, and used them. We will also read a number of secondary works to develop a critical vocabulary for this discussion.
The term “Bible” does not have an absolute meaning; Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant, and Jewish bibles contain different books in different orders, and different denominations tend to prefer different translations, different styles, and different sorts of annotations. Since there is no single “Bible” for all readers, there is no innocent or unbiased way to select a text for our common reading. We will use Robert Alter’s Genesis: Translation and Commentary (Norton, 1996) as our primary text; everyone should have a copy of this book. Another required text is John Gabel, Charles Wheeler, and Anthony Yorke, eds., The Bible as Literature, 5th edition (Oxford, 2006); this will give us background and context, and material for relating Genesis to other books of the Bible. You should also have access to a complete Bible (Old and New Testament); the version most commonly cited in academic discussions is B. M. Metzger and R. E. Murphy, eds., The New Oxford Annotated Bible with Apocrypha (Oxford, 2001), which uses the 1991 New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) of the Bible. We will also read essays from other sources, copies of which are online or reserve at the library.
This site uses Michel Fortin’s PHP implementation of John Gruber’s text-to-HTML Markdown syntax. Fortin’s work is available at http://www.michelf.com/projects/php-markdown/; the original Markdown syntax can be found at http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/.