New Testament Rhetorical Narratology: An Invitation toward Integration

Dinkler, Michal Beth

doi:10.1163/15685152-00242p04

Cited by 8 publications

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“…The third line of criticism links together a variety of approaches-"rhetorical criticism" (Kennedy 1984), narratology (Rhoads and Michie 1982;Anderson and Moore 1992), "rhetorical narratology" (which attempts to reconcile the two aforementioned lines of inquiry, see Dinkler 2016), or yet "Biblical [structural] rhetoric" (critical of the former approaches' reliance on Greek-Roman rhetoric and poetic-see Meynet (2012); similar perspective already suggested in Bailey (1983)). These various schools all stress the following: rather than dividing the text into small, discrete units, one should approach the text as a whole so as to discern the structural features that govern its organization.…”

Section: The Limits Of Historical-critical Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Jesus, the Anthropologist: Patterns of Emplotment and Modes of Action in the Parables

Vermander

2022

Religions

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This article uses a typology of action framework to analyze a selection of the gospels’ parables. It does so by connecting these parables to A. G. Haudricourt and C. Ferret’s research on the “anthropology of action”. After summarizing Haudricourt’s and Ferret’s results, I relate modes of action to types of emplotment. I select four parables as the basis of my analysis, using J. P. Meier’s findings as a guide for selection. I discern in these four parables four modes of emplotment, which enables me to insert them into larger narrative networks found within the gospels. I locate the corpus of narratives determined this way in the context of Jesus’ time so as to better appreciate how the four modes of emplotment combine into a typology of action shaped by a specific social and cultural context. Within this typology of action, I put a spotlight on the way our corpus’ modes of emplotment make use of “discontinuous actions” (coined by Ferret). “Discontinuous actions” decisively initiate or correct a specified course of events. The stress on this dimension of action applies to the relationships occurring between humans and the natural world, within the social world, and between humans and the supranatural world, thus connecting one order of reality with another.

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Section: The Limits Of Historical-critical Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Jesus, the Anthropologist: Patterns of Emplotment and Modes of Action in the Parables

Vermander

2022

Religions

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“…More recently, a turn towards rhetorical narratology integrates narratology with rhetorical approaches in order to investigate how readers experience texts. 25 In spite of their differences, each approach posits a unified text as a starting point. Additionally, Mark Allan Powell comments that "[t]he basic goal of narrative criticism is to discern how the implied reader of a narrative would be expected to respond to the text," implying a model of communication and raising the question, "expected by whom?"…”

Section: Narrative Criticism and Reader-response Criticismmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Cambridge Companion to the New Testament

2021

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The literary turn in New Testament studies was indicative of a larger shift in the landscape of biblical scholarship in the 1970s and 1980s. For more than a century, historical criticism had been the dominant approach to interpreting biblical texts. Under its influence, the task of interpretation had to do with investigating the prehistory and formation of biblical texts through the use of source, form, and redaction criticisms. Some scholars, however, began to question whether a solely historical and positivistic approach could fully illuminate the nature of biblical texts, generating a movement to read the Bible as literature.This movement was anticipated by two seminal works, Hermann Gunkel's The Legends of Genesis (1901), and Erich Auerbach's Mimesis: The Representation of Reality on Western Literature (1946), both of which employed narratological methods for performing biblical interpretation. 1 Subsequently, a pair of Society of Biblical Literature presidential addresses disputed the historical-critical hegemony in biblical studies by introducing a literary-rhetorical approach. 2 First, Amos Wilder (1955) challenged biblical scholars to draw from literary, anthropological, and psychological resources to interpret the symbolic language of the New Testament, because he believed historical-critical tools to be ill-equipped to do so. A decade later, James Muilenberg (1968) introduced the phrase "rhetorical criticism" to describe a supplementary investigation to form criticism. He challenged biblical scholars to attend not only to forms but also to the literary devices that lay bare the progression of an author's thought.In response to these challenges, biblical scholars sought and found theoretical allies among contemporary literary critics. The landscape of contemporary literary criticism had already shifted, since its practitioners had critiqued historical approaches to its canonical texts in the mid-twentieth century. Biblical scholars had first used literary criticism (Literarkritik) to refer to source criticism as part of the historical-critical toolbox. But with the appropriation of modern literary theory, scholars distinguished the "new literary criticism" to refer to the variety of approaches to the biblical text that followed developments in modern literary studies. 3 I divide the following discussion into two parts. First, I discuss narrative criticism and reader-response criticism, by which New Testament scholars tend to approach texts as formal structures. Second, I discuss poststructuralism, by which New Testament scholars tend to approach texts as cultural artefacts.

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“…10.1.66-68). For more examples and discussion, see Dinkler forthcoming.…”

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confidence: 99%

Suffering, Misunderstanding, and Suffering Misunderstanding: The Markan Misunderstanding Motif as a Form of Jesus’ Suffering

Dinkler

2016

Journal for the Study of the New Testament

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Broad references to ‘suffering’ in early Christian literature can give the false impression that all early Christians conceived of suffering in the same way, and that depictions of suffering in early Christian texts all function similarly. And yet, close attention to specific texts reveals the opposite: early Christian authors depict suffering differently, and the rhetoric of suffering functions in diverse ways in individual texts. My thesis is as follows: The two motifs that have long taken pride of place in Markan scholarship – Jesus’ suffering and the disciples’ repeated incomprehension (the so-called ‘misunderstanding motif’) – are in fact two sides of the same coin. In Mark, being misunderstood is a form of social ostracism, and thus contributes to the suffering that Jesus must endure.

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New Testament Rhetorical Narratology: An Invitation toward Integration

Cited by 8 publications

References 0 publications

Jesus, the Anthropologist: Patterns of Emplotment and Modes of Action in the Parables

Jesus, the Anthropologist: Patterns of Emplotment and Modes of Action in the Parables

The Cambridge Companion to the New Testament

Suffering, Misunderstanding, and Suffering Misunderstanding: The Markan Misunderstanding Motif as a Form of Jesus’ Suffering

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