Syllabus: Women and Gender in the Bible and the Ancient World

This course will study in depth some of the narratives of female characters of the Bible, reading closely and considering a variety of perspectives, including historical, literary, theological and ideological approaches. Students will have the opportunity to engage in close reading of selected texts from different divisions of the Bible’ relate biblical texts to a variety of religious and secular contexts; discuss feminism and gender theory and their applications in biblical scholarship; becomes familiar with a range of theoretical interpretative approaches to texts. The course will explore intersections of gender, sex, race, ethnicity and class across the stories of women in both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. University of Glasgow, Humanities

Syllabi. Hebrew Scriptures/Old Testament

Interpretation of the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh), or ‘Old Testament,’ played a formative role in the development of the religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. This course provides an overview of the diverse genres of literature contained within the Hebrew Bible as well as an introduction to its modern critical study. Representative passages drawn from the mythological, imaginative, prophetic, and cultic strata of the Bible are examined in some detail, with emphasis laid upon acquiring a nuanced understanding of the significance of these passages within their historical and literary contexts. UNC Charlotte, Religious Studies

Syllabi. Defining the Moral Body: Sex, Race, and Gender in Religion

What is the ideal, moral body in a given culture? How does it perform? What does it look like? How does it survive in a pluralistic, global religious society? Are there multiple and/or shifting ideals? In this course, we will consider the ways religious discourses and practices have been used to assign meanings to the body and its activities. Through an exploration of varied religious contexts across historical time, we will interrogate how specific religious cultures have defined the boundaries of moral bodies via regulations concerning "appropriate" sexual, gendered, and racial performance. By examining the relationship between religious vocabularies--such as immorality, primitivism, and divine imperative--the racialization and gendering of bodies in the modern era, social taboos, and more, we will access broader questions regarding how religious discourses dictate and regulate the moral body. Stanford University, Religious Studies

quest'estate farò una ricerca di syllabi interessanti su valori/miti/narrazioni fondativi della nostra cultura.  Ogni suggerimento è benvenuto!

Emmanuel Carrère e TS Eliot

 ... non hanno nulla in comune, ma sono il soggetto di due articoli interessanti, che mettono in luce i lati inquietanti dei due scrittori. Di Emmanuele Carrère parla Ian Parker sul New Yorker. Ecco l'incipit dell'articolo:

Emmanuel Carrère, who writes with the clear-eyed judgment of someone who has trained himself, against instinct, to take an interest in other people, was eating lunch one day last fall in a restaurant in north-central Paris. Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet, a film director and Carrère’s partner, had joined him; they live nearby, in an apartment as spare and as sunny as one in a yogurt commercial. 

di TS Eliot parla Erica Wagner su The New Statesmen:

Withdrawn and prejudiced, the poet is hard to warm to – but Robert Crawford’s new biography shows how Eliot’s second marriage transformed his life.

si allude alla nuova biografia di Eliot, Robert Crawford, Eliot: After The Waste Land (Jonathan Cape).

Words

vorrei segnalare una serie di interviste a docenti e critici letterari sul proprio mestiere. Sono uscite su   The Point Magazine a cura di Jessica Swoboda. Qui è l'introduzione all'intervista a Terry Eagleton, professore di letteratura a Oxford, Manchester e Lancaster.

Our conversation traversed the worlds of Derrida and Foucault, the political arena of the Sixties and Seventies, the decline of theory and the value in writing for public venues. Many jokes were made, laughs were shared, and I left encouraged to try on different writing styles. I also left convinced that one of the most important habits we can develop as writers is doing justice to our opponents’ arguments. That doesn’t mean, though, that we have to stop throwing punches.

Eagleton, a Marxist literary critic, has written eighty essays for the London Review of Books alone and published over fifty books, with four more books in the pipeline. His book Literary Theory: An Introduction is even an academic best seller, having sold over 750,000 copies. It’s no wonder, then, that the Independent has referred to him as “the man who succeeded F R Leavis as Britain’s most influential academic critic.” Our conversation confirms that the question uniting his many publications is: What is the meaning of literature? We talked over the phone in March and April. 

sempre a proposito di scrittura, segnalo la lettera di Ali Smith a George Orwell sul perché scriviamo.

Dear George Orwell,

Why do we write? Given that words and reality, as you once put it, are so often « no liker » to each other « than chessmen to living beings ».

Because I’m writing to you now from a future no-one could have seen coming –– except maybe yourself, and H G Wells, and J G Ballard and the furthest-seeing writers over the centuries from Sophocles to Margaret Atwood.

Because everything you wrote gifts us with the knowledge that words are the chesspieces by which the powers that be will play their games with our lives. You know, as the current UK Prime Minister puts it, that « human beings are creatures of the imagination », that « people live by narrative ». Ali Smith, European Review of Books