Journal articles on the topic 'French biblical translations'

Abstract This article argues for intralingual intertemporal translations as a separate category within the field of translation studies. Not only do these translations seem to have common characteristics and behaviors, but it is precisely their particularities that make them a key to understanding more ‘typical’ translations. Two main sets of examples will serve as demonstration: translations from Old French into Middle and Modern French, and a Modern Hebrew translation of the Old Testament, originally written in Biblical Hebrew, as well as the public discussion following its publication.

The biblical figure of Lot’s wife in the novels of Mary Anne Sadlier functions typologically, assigning the role of Lot’s wife to both men and women. This essay explores how such an interpretative move functioned to reverse the charges leveled against Catholic men by muscular Christianity and Catholic women by the Protestant Cult of True Womanhood. Sadlier’s audience was the burgeoning Irish American immigrant community, but the ethnically porous character of Sadlier’s sources of inspiration for that community might be attested by her family’s Catholic catechetical publishing company’s reprint of Cardinal Wiseman’s Fabiola in the United States a mere two years after its initial publication in Britain and by her numerous translations from the French. The choice of a typological figure with a widely acknowledged perceived historical basis helped Sadlier to navigate between progressive and conservative Catholic biblical interpretation contemporary to her writing. Typology also facilitated Sadlier’s participation in the Catholic polemics against anti-Catholic, nativist literature by assimilating a negative biblical exemplar to biblically devoted Protestants.

The article offers a concise presentation of the project linked to the Library Fund of the Pontifical Urbaniana University, namely, to study the inculturation of the Christian faith by relating the documentation on the editions of the Bible to the catechisms in the territories entrusted to the pastoral care of the Congregation for Evangelization of peoples. The vastness of the project itself is marked today by the difficulty of using more extensive documentation than that present in the Fund of the same Library. However, more limited segments of the indicated material of interest can already be identified. More specifically, the African continent shows quite a varied phenomenology of the editions of the Bible: from translations of the Latin Vulgate into local languages, to translations from English or French, themselves translations from Latin. In the post-conciliar period, the translations of the Bible from the original biblical languages emerge. This is the case of the Kinyarwanda versions of the NT (1988, 1989) and of the OT-NT in a single volume (1990, 1992), in which, alongside pastoral purposes, the results of modern biblical exegesis are evident, to the point of proposing categorizations of literary bodies of biblical literature from an interconfessional and also interreligious perspective.

This article uses Mediated Discourse Analysis (Norris & Jones 2005) to investigate a dual translation: One, the English-Maori original Potiki by Patricia Grace (1986), a translation of Maori culture that issues a complex postcolonial challenge and neocolonial protest; and two, the German version of the book translated by Martini-Honus and Martini (2005 edition). Findings indicate that the book’s essence embedded in a complex interweaving of Maori myths and biblical parallels has not been recognized by professional reviewers of the German translation and that certain mistranslations distort important messages from the original. All readers of translations potentially contribute to indigenous people regaining their voice, but only if these readers can decipher the original actions and discourses in their languages. This article delivers a key to understanding Potiki, a classic text widely used in teaching and already translated into at least five languages, i.e. Dutch, Finnish, French, German and Spanish.

Newer and newer Bible translations from original languages tend to appear regularly. Their authors pursue a plethora of strategies, from interlinear to philological to dynamic ones, taking as the source text not only the Hebrew, but also the Greek canon. Since the 1980s, the books of the Greek Bible have been translated into German, English, Italian, Spanish and French; ten years ago, this group was comple­mented by the Polish rendering made by Rev. Prof. Remigiusz Popowski. Though enthusiastically received, the text was not much researched. This article is intended to make up for this paucity and present the Polish text of the Septuagint from the perspective of its bibliological process and that of descriptive translation studies: a brief account of its historical background, the author of the translation, a record of editions and the significance for the Polish biblical milieu is followed by a closer analysis and exemplification of strate­gies and techniques adopted by the author.

AbstractThis article focuses on Georges Balandier's autobiographical essayAfrique ambiguë(1957). Its translation into English,Ambiguous Africa: Cultures in Collision(1966), provides the basis for an examination of the concept of translation in its linguistic but also, and above all, transcultural dimensions. As a text,Ambiguous Africadoes not quite render the subtlety of the French original but beyond its translational shortcomings, Balandier's book is also shown to conduct an in-depth analysis of late colonialism in sub-Saharan Africa. This era is characterized by a high degree of cultural anxiety on the part of the colonizers and the colonized. Echoing other anti-colonial thinkers of the period – Balandier was a regular contributor toPrésence Africaine– he records the environmental, artistic, psychological,andlinguistic devastation generated by the colonial process in this part of the world. Balandier's assessment is pessimistic, but he identifies the ability of some unassimilated African intellectuals and members of messianic movements such as Matswanism and Kimbanguism to challenge the hegemonic status of the colonial Ur-Text. This emancipative move relies on vernacular intellectual and cultural resources and is driven by an attempt to re-write and translate biblical stories anew. It is argued here that this process of indigenous re-appropriation, however ambiguous it might have been assessed by Balandier, is postcolonial for it bears witness to a partial de-canonization of the colonial source text.

The article focuses on an analysis of the semantic character of the Greek adverb εὖ and its prefix role in the morphological formations of selected lexical units present in the texts of the New Testament. The author begins by addressing the possibility of creating lexical units using the selected prefix, listing the lexemes with the highest degree of productivity appearing in the chosen corpus. The units selected in this way are then analysed in terms of their functioning in Greek New Testament texts, with or without the prefix εὖ. The analysis makes it possible to indicate the semantic contribution that the studied prefix makes to the newly created linguistic formations. The work also focuses on a comparative analysis of the translations adopted in French biblical studies and suggests a deeper understanding of them based on the results of the proposed description.

Paul Claudel is a French writer of the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, known in Russia for his poetic works of the early period and dramaturgy. His short prose and poetic commentaries on theBible are practically unknown in the Russian-speaking scientific field. Most of his prose heritage consists of translations and commentaries on biblical books, including the apex text Paul Claudel inquires the Song of Songs(Paul Claudel interroge le Cantique des Cantiques). The purpose of this article is to introduce into sci-entific circulation the topic ‘Claudel as a prose writer, author of literary commentaries on the Bible’. It is this part of Claudel’s heritage that needs to be studied so that it would become possible to understand and assess the place of Claudel in the world culture of the 20thcentury. First of all, the paper deals with the method of Claudel’s work with the Bible (daily reading, reference to the works of the Church Fathers and concordan-ces), which forms the poetological foundations of the style. These books shape a creative laboratory from which a method of literary commentary on biblical texts grows. This is how Claudel’s biblical style is born. It can be defined as an attitude to the Scripture not as to a series of messages, but as to images. The preserva-tion of the centuries-old tradition of the Church in the interpretation of the Word leads the writer to a poetic commentary, a ‘Claudelian novel’ with the biblical characters and plot. Claudel makes the drama of the Holy Scripture the center of the reader’s interest, uniting the sacred and the profane, ennobling hypocrisy, direct-ing mimesis to biblical reality, the existence of which Claudel does not doubt. The writer emphasized that his works were exclusively literary. The understanding of the Claudel’s text as literary is deepened not only by the text itself, but by the reader’s experience and readiness to perceive it. Thus, Claudel turns out to be the creator of a new dialogical novel word.

Michael Edwards, professor of English literature at the Collège de France in Paris, poet, critic, and the first British subject to be elected to the French Academy, has turned his attention in recent years to biblical literature. In 2016 he published Bible et poésie (Paris, Fallois). A translation of the sequel, Pour un christianisme intempestif (Paris, Fallois), was released in February of 2022 by Fortress Press under the title, Untimely Christianity. In the same year, the English translation of his 2016 volume, under the title The Bible and Poetry, will be published by New York Review Books. This study examines the poet-scholar’s perspective on scripture, on theology, on the art of translation and his opinions of various modern translations of the Bible and highlights the most useful insights he contributes. The notion of Christianity’s radical alterity is an important key to Edwards’s work. Christianity is foreign to us, it is strange, so the scriptures that reveal it are also radically other. We Christians have been so desensitized to that otherness by our familiarity with the text that we seldom are challenged by it with the force that energized it originally. Its immense countercultural potential for transforming us and our world is blunted so that we don’t truly hear the voice of God in it. Edwards’s essential purpose is to help us reawaken our ability to hear the Bible in its untimely, countercultural power.

Marot’s Psalm paraphrases have been widely hailed as a major poetic achievement in French Renaissance poetry. Although Marot wants to stay as close as possible to his biblical source, his rendering of Ps. 137 stands out due to some of its metrical features and tone, as shaped by the initial rime aquatiques-melancoliques, which is totally absent from earlier translations. Far from being ornamental, such an innovative move imparts a new reading to the text, reworking some of its features while thoroughly rephrasing the expression of loss that pervades the entire poem. Engaging in a close exegetical reading of the text, the article aims at showing how Marot achieves to convey a deeper poetic meaning in addressing one of the most violent, excruciating songs of the Psalter, thus turning its bitter harshness into a meditative piece of sorts and a genuine masterpiece, testifying to both his spiritual commitment and his aesthetic position.

The article reveals a new way of interpreting the last words of Shakespeare’s Richard III on the Bosworth battlefield (5.4.7, 13). As evidenced by numerous parodies and anecdotes the phrase became an idiom in the age of Shakespeare, and in the 19th century Russian translations has survived metamorphoses ranging from the fairy “half the kingdom” to the alternative “the whole kingdom” for a horse. The available interpretations in scientific editions don’t clarify the expression. It is absent in historical (Hall, Holinshed) and possible literary (Richardus Tertius, True Tragedy) sources, but corresponds to the logic of character and actions of Shakespeare’s Richard. We traced the development of the “white horse” motive, identified its heraldic symbolism and the leading biblical allegory associated with the image of the victor in the battle for the world (Rev. 19: 11, 16), as well as the playwright’s emphasis on the tyrant’s progressing madness. The revealed increase in biblical lexis (“irons of wrath,” “cast,” etc) and imagery (non-sunrise, the paradox of “George” and “dragon”), the symbolism of the stage space (set in accordance with the iconography of the Crucifixion and the Last Judgment) allow us to read the denouement of the cross-cutting theme of the fight between “the world” and “nothing” (1.2.240) in spirit and tradition of religious play. Richard’s “wager” takes the play beyond the boundaries of the genres codified by the Folio (Histories and Tragedies) and raises it to a mystery play, demonstrating the last battle in Heaven. Paradoxically, the first Russian translator of the play, S. Sergievsky, at the end of the 18th century most accurately succeeded in conveying the meaning of the “bet,” following the French translation by Pierre Antoine de La Place.

This article describes The Gateway to the Syriac Saints, a database project developed by the Syriac Reference Portal (www.syriaca.org). It is a research tool for the study of Syriac saints and hagiographic texts. The Gateway to the Syriac Saints is a two-volume database: 1) Qadishe and 2) Bibliotheca Hagiographica Syriaca Electronica (BHSE). Hagiography, the lives of the saints, is a multiform genre. It contains elements of myth, history, biblical exegesis, romance, and theology. The production of saints’ lives blossomed in late antiquity alongside the growth of the cult of the saints. Scholars have attended to hagiographic traditions in Greek and Latin, but many scholars have yet to discover the richness of Syriac hagiographic literature: the stories, homilies, and hymns on the saints that Christians of the Middle East told and preserved. It is our hope that our database will give scholars and students increased access to these traditions to generate new scholarship. The first volume, Qadishe or “saints” in Syriac, is a digital catalogue of saints or holy persons venerated in the Syriac tradition. Some saints are native to the Syriac-speaking milieu, whereas others come from other linguistic or cultural traditions. Through the translation of their hagiographies and the diffusion of saints’ cults in the late antique world, saints were adopted, “imported,” and appropriated into Syriac religious memory. The second volume, the BHSE, focuses on Syriac hagiographic texts. The BHSE contains the titles of over 1000 Syriac stories, hymns, and homilies on saints. It also includes authors’ or hagiographers’ names, the first and last lines of the texts (in Syriac, English, and French), bibliographic information, and the names of the manuscripts containing these hagiographic works. We have also listed modern and ancient translations of these works. All of the data in the Gateway to the Syriac Saints has been encoded in TEI, and it is fully searchable, linkable, and open.

The soul in the mediaeval PsalterThe paper is an attempt to examine what lies at the heart and soul of the mediaeval Psalter in the contemporaneous approach(es) to its vernacularisations. In particular, the paper investigates the applications of the mediaeval translation theory in relation to a 12th-century Anglo-Norman, a 15th-century Middle French and four 14th-century Middle English prose Psalter renditions, with a view to locate them within the spirit of the attitude to biblical translations current in the Middle Ages and against the backdrop of the position of the Psalter in the period. In practical terms, the analysis is conducted on the basis of the equivalent selection strategies for rendering four Latin nouns central to the Psalter: anima, animae ‘soul,’ cor, cordis ‘heart’ and, perhaps surprisingly, ren, renis ‘kidney’ and lumbus, lumbi ‘loins’. All cases of variation in this respect are studied closely from intra- as well as extra-textual perspectives in order to establish the possible reasons behind the divergences, as these constitute exceptions rather than the rule, even in apparently heterodox renditions. Dusza w średniowiecznym PsałterzuArtykuł stanowi próbę bliższego przyjrzenia się podstawowym zasadom średniowiecznego podejścia do tłumaczenia psałterza na języki wernakularne. Przedstawiono w nim analizę zastosowania mediewalnej teorii tłumaczeń w odniesieniu do dwunastowiecznego Psałterza anglo-normandzkiego, piętnastowiecznego Psałterza średniofrancuskiego i czterech czternastowiecznych tłumaczeń Księgi Psalmów na średnioangielski. Celem było wykazanie, w jakim stopniu analizowane teksty odzwierciedlają ówczesne podejście do tłumaczeń biblijnych w kontekście znaczenia psałterza w średniowieczu. Badanie przeprowadzone jest na podstawie doboru ekwiwalentów w tłumaczeniu czterech – niezwykle istotnych z powodu rangi tych tekstów w średniowieczu – łacińskich rzeczowników: anima, animae‚ ‘dusza’, cor, cordis‚ ‘serce’ oraz, co może zaskoczyć, ren, renis‚ ‘nerka’ i lumbus, lumbi, ‘lędźwie’. Najwięcej uwagi poświęcono ustaleniu źródła analizowanej z perspektywy zarówno intra-, jak i ekstratekstualnej wariancji w doborze odpowiedników, jako że rozbieżność w tym względzie stanowi raczej wyjątek, a nie regułę, nawet w tłumaczeniach – wydawałoby się – heterodoksyjnych.

На русский язык переведён фрагмент из «Книги совершенства» - пространного аскетического трактата восточносирийского автора VII века Мартирия-Сахдоны, епископа Церкви Востока. Он известен как руководитель монахов и видный духовный писатель. Примечателен он главным образом тем, что пошёл на разрыв с Церковью Востока,когда стал учить об одной ипостаси Христа, за что и был лишён сана и предан анафеме. «Книга совершенства» сохранилась не менее, чем в двух рукописях, древнейшая из которых - Argent.4116 - происходит из синайского монастыря Неопалимой купины (Бет-Мар-Моше) и датируется 837 г. В 1960-х гг. «Книга совершенства» была опубликована вместе с прочими известными сочинениями Мартирия-Сахдоны, тогда же был опубликован их французский перевод. Христологическое учение Мартирия-Сахдоны, с давних пор и до сего времени привлекающее внимание исследователей, содержится, главным образом, в приводимом ниже фрагменте «Книги совершенства». Помимо вопросов христологии, в нем изложено учение о Святой Троице, всеобщем Воскресении и Страшном Суде, а также сказано о взаимосвязи веры и нравственности. Перевод снабжён словарёмосновных терминов и подстрочным комментарием, в котором указаны источники, главным образом, библейских цитат, а также даны пояснения к переводу. This is a translation from Syriac into Russian of a fragment of the «Book of Perfection», a large ascetic treatise. The author of the book, Martyrius-Sahdona, a bishop in the Church of the East, is a 7th century East-Syrian writer. He is known as a teacher of monks and famous spiritual author. He is especially distinguished by his controversy with the Church of the East, after he begun to teach about one hypostasis of the Christ. For this reason, he was disgowned and anathematized. The «Book of Perfection» is preserved in at least two manuscripts, the earliest of which originates from the Beth-Mar-Moshe Monastery of Mount Sinai and is dated by 837 AC (Argent. 4116). In the 1960s the «Book of Perfection» was published along with some other known Sahdona’s writings. At the same time corresponding translations into French were issued. The christological teaching of Sahdona, which has been attracting attention of researchers from the earliest times hitherto, is mainly contained in the present fragment of the «Book of Perfection». Besides christological aspects, it also contains doctrines of the Trinity, of the universal resurrection, and of the Last Judgement, along with considerations on the relationship between faith and morality. The introduction presents brief biographic and literary information and outlines the main subjects of the fragment. The translation is supplemented with a glossary of the main terms and a commentary indicating sources of citations in the text (foremost biblical) and explaining the translation.

THE CAUCASUS AS A GATE TO THE ORIENT. ORIENTAL MOTIFS IN TADEUSZ ŁADA-ZABŁOCKI'S OEUVREThe East, its culture and literature were always part of the rich, erudite poetic imagination of Tadeusz Łada-Zabłocki 1811–1847, a tsarist exile to the Caucasus. He spoke Oriental languages Georgian and Persian and had a thorough knowledge of the Koran, a short fragment of which he even translated probably from French. Although today we only have his poetry inspired by the Caucasian mountains, he was also no stranger to extensive travel accounts unfortunately, his Dziennik podróży mojej do Tyflisu i z Tyflisu po różnych krajach za Kaukazem Journal From My Journey To and From Tiflis Across Various Countries Beyond the Caucasus and notes from his Armenian expedition were lost. An important source of inspiration for Zabłocki, encouraging him to explore the East, were the Philomaths’ translations of Oriental poetry by Jan Wiernikowski and Aleksander Chodźko, while his model of reception of the Orient were the oeuvres of Mickiewicz primarily his Crimean and Odessa Sonnets, Byron and Thomas Moore especially the fragment of Lalla Rookh — Paradise and the Peri. The exile brutally brought Zabłocki into contact with the real Orient, terribly dangerous and diametrically different from the one described by Western travellers. It is, therefore, not surprising, that their superficial and simplified accounts were criticised by the Polish poet and soldier.Zabłocki’s oeuvre, both pre-exile and Caucasus period works, is full of various Oriental reminiscences: from the Biblical topos of the Paradise ab Oriente, through numerous splendid images of Caucasian nature, scenes from the life of Caucasian highlanders, poetic imitation of the metre of Caucasian folk dances, apt ethnographic observations in the verses, borrowings from Oriental languages, extraordinarily sensual eastern erotic poems, to translations of texts of Caucasian cultures Tatar, Azeri and Georgian songs. Zabłocki drew on both folk culture of Caucasian tribes, and on Eastern mythologies as well as universal culture of the Islamic world. He presents an ambivalent image of Caucasian highlanders in his poetry: sometimes they acquire traits of noble, free, valiant and indomitable individuals, typical of the Romantic idea of highlanders, on other occasions the label “Son of the East” becomes a synonym of Asian barbarity.Freed from the service in the tsarist army, Zabłocki planned travels across nearby Persia, Asia Minor, and even Arabia, Nubia and Palestine. However, the plans never became a reality, owing to a lack of funds and the poet’s early death of cholera.Zabłocki’s “Eastern” oeuvre fully reveals the “liminal”, demarcational nature of the Caucasian mountains, for centuries constituting the limes between Europe and Asia, the East and the West, a meeting place of the Christian and the Muslim Orients.]]>

Abstract: The French humanist Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples (ca. 1460–1536) enjoyed in his lifetime a notoriety second only to Erasmus himself. His numerous works of biblical scholarship, his commentaries and homilies, and his translation of the Bible into French make him one of the most significant forerunners of the Reformation in Europe. His scholarly achievements as well as his profound piety deserve to be better known. While an in-depth study of Lefèvre’s scholarly achievements and theology is obviously not possible here, I propose to highlight his main contribution to biblical scholarship and hermeneutics.

Abstract This article analyzes Melekh Artus (King Arthur), a unique Hebrew translation of sections from the old French prose Merlin and mort Artu in the Lancelot-Grail cycle. Written in a single fragment from 1279 in northern Italy, this translation proves close Jewish engagement with old French texts. Through satirical biblical references and subtle critique of his material, the author reframes the Arthurian narrative to promote universal morals. Rather than Judaize the Arthurian canon and its Christian characters, he validates them as viable models for his Jewish audience.

Abstract Seen from a broad cross-linguistic perspective, the English verb (to) love is quite unusual because it has very broad scope: it can apply to a mother’s love, a husband’s love, a sister’s love, etc. without any restrictions whatsoever; and the same applies to its counterparts in many other European languages. Trying to locate the origins of this phenomenon, I have looked to the Bible. Within the Bible, I have found both continuity and innovation. In the Hebrew Bible, the verb ’āhēb, rendered in the Greek translation of the Old Testament known as the Septuagint with the verb agapao, implies a “preferential love”, e.g. it is used for a favourite wife of a favourite son. In the New Testament, the concept of ‘love’ loses the “preferential” components and thus becomes applicable across the board: between anybody and anybody else. The paper argues that the very broad meaning of verbs like love in English, aimer in French, lieben in German, etc. reflects a shared conceptual heritage of many European languages, with its roots in the New Testament; and it shows that by taking a semantic perspective on these historical developments, and exploring them through the rigorous framework of NSM and Minimal English, we can arrive at clear and verifiable hypotheses about a theme which is of great general interest, regardless of one’s own religious and philosophical views and commitments.

Two recent French poets, Henri Meschonnic and Jacques Roubaud, have found in Wittgenstein's philosophy an alternative to post-structuralist poetics. Meschonnic's poetry and his theoretical writings show a sustained critical engagement with Wittgenstein, whom he reads in conjunction with Emile Benveniste. The writers inform his theory of poetic rhythm and his practice of biblical translation. Roubaud's use of Wittgenstein, by contrast, here examined in the collection Quelque chose noir (1984), is linked partly with the poet's grief following the death of his wife Alix Cléo Roubaud, a photographer and an avid reader of Wittgenstein. In Roubaud, Wittgenstein opens up the space for a meditation on disappearance and absence. Roubaud reformulates passages from Wittgenstein's On Certainty (Wittgenstein's last philosophical text written when he was already seriously ill) in poems evoking Alix's memory.

This paper will focus on the translators as their situation has proved to be more and more difficult in France. With examples, we want to consider how one’s position has evolved in the publishing world from the 16th century to the present. Looking at the 16th century, we can observe a real fever for translations of ancient texts. In the Netherlands, Italy and France, printers were translators and signed their translations with their proper name. Playwrights did the same with Latin and Greek works. For example, we know Oedipo tyranno by Giustiniani who translated Sophocles. The name of the Greek or Latin writer was eclipsed by the translator’s name such as Plantin and the Biblia Polyglotta, or Belleforest with his translation of The War of the Jews written by Flavius Josephus. The translation of the title gave the work a new specificity and was considered as the genuine work of the translator even though the name of the original author was still given. During the 16th century in France, Literary Property Laws were called “Privilège” and were attached to the author of the printed text. Later on, this law changed. We know that playwrights used translations and never mentioned the authors as they had actually never done before. Indeed, this particular type of literature often evaded the law. The publishers became more and more important and could thus decide what would be announced on the book’s cover. The author is to be mentioned for legal reasons, but translators are rarely mentioned. Today, you have to search for their name inside the book despite the fact that as our world is becoming more and more global we need them more and more. To some extent, on stage, some directors plunder translations done by specialists and attribute them to themselves. Two avenues of enquiry should help us understand the French translator’s paradox, which consist in the fact that the translator’s status evolves from a finder and producer to an intellectual whose name is today nearly ignored – despite his/her legal status.

The purpose of the article is to introduce readers to the translation of the article by the French Russianist, publicist and translator N.A. Struve "Dostoevsky and the Gospel of John" (1983), which has not been published in Russian until now. It is through language, first of all, that the reader gets acquainted with the writer, therefore, works that consider stylistic features of biblical texts in their subsequent comparison with Dostoevsky's texts are of particular value to us. In addition to the translation itself, the authors' tasks included comparing N.A. Struve's research with similar works in Russian, as well as compiling a commentary on some quotations, concepts and terms used in N.A. Struve's article. Dostoevistics has accumulated a lot of works devoted to the influence of St. The writings on the life, creativity and spiritual path of F.M. Dostoevsky, however, there are not so many studies among them that raise the question of the influence of the text of Holy Scripture on the writer's idiosyncrasy. For us, the syntax of Dostoevsky is of particular interest, namely, the comparison of the compositional connections of words in his works and the text of the Gospel of John. The proposed translation and commentary allow us to supplement the ideas that have developed in Dostoevistics about the influence of the Gospel of John on the work of F.M. Dostoevsky, taking into account the results of recent research, including the methodology of studying and describing the author's idiostyle and compiling a dictionary of the writer's language.

The public release of artificial intelligence tools such as Microsoft’s Bing Chat built on OpenAI’s generative pre-trained transformer (GPT) continues to spark extensive interest—attracting headlines, prompting important interdisciplinary questions, and posing dilemmas both ethical and methodological. The aim of this paper is to provide a sampling and temporal snapshot of AI-powered Bing’s abilities through the creation, translation, and adaptation of pseudo-biblical content. We adopt as our source text an AI-generated parable in the style of the King James Bible—here entitled “The Parable of the Peanut Butter Sandwich”—originally prompted by software developer Thomas Ptacek. For the purposes of this paper, Bing adapted the original parable into multiple versions (Nida, poem, acrostic, and French), supplied it with paratext (introduction, illustrations, and glossary), and analyzed it from the perspectives of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and the Documentary Hypothesis. Lastly, Bing generated a sermon outline in the style of renowned orator St. John Chrysostom. We hope that subsequent studies at the nexus of artificial intelligence and Bible translation will continue to build on the Parable of the Peanut Butter Sandwich to explore both the potential and the implications of emergent technology.

The article analyzes Psalm 119 as an element of religious discourse and part of the Bible in terms of communication strategies as a factor in its impact on the mind of the addressee. Recourse to the Bible is determined by the power of its influence on the minds of people through the use of various language and speech means. Religious discourse differs from other types of discourse in its manipulativeness. However, since this word has acquired a negative connotation, we consider it inappropriate to use it in relation to biblical texts, and we prefer the term „influence”. Religious discourse is organized taking into account the purpose of influencing the addressee of communication. Therefore, the necessary communication strategies are selected for the effective implementation of this task. Speech influence is carried out with the help of communicative strategies and tactics, the essence of which is operations on the knowledge of the addressee, on his value categories, emotions, will. The choice of communicative strategies depends on the specifics, purpose and genre of religious discourse – to establish faith, convert to faith and explain the rules of life, behavior in the religious world, the place of God and man in it. Psalm 119 is dominated by explanatory and prayerful strategies, so this psalm has a didactic focus. With the help of these strategies, the author not only builds his conversation with God, but also paints his picture of the world, explains his place in it as a person and shows who God is for him and how to address Him. In addition, communication strategies correlate with elements of influence, namely: persuasion / explanatory strategy; suggestion / explanatory strategy; motivation to follow / evaluation and affirmation strategies; with the formation of the benefit of favor / all strategies used in the psalm; manipulation or influence / all the strategies used in the psalm, because they are used to show how it should be.

The commentary is devoted to the Ukrainian translation of «Inner Experience» work by Georges Bataille, the famous French intellectual of the twentieth century. The paper outlines a short history of publications and extensions of «Inner Experience», which is a certain difficulty for the translator and the initial condition for incomplete translation of the work, which was not published in full while its author was alive. The paper is devoted to analysis of the key philosophical terms, the translation of which was problematic: in particular, such concepts as «angoisse» (anxiety), «supplice» (torment), «communication» (communication), «discourse» (discourse), «esprit» (mind),» entendement (understanding), «intelligence» (intelligence), «savoir» (knowledge), «connaissance» (knowledge), «ipse» (not translated) and «ipseité» (self). The concept of «anguish» provides an opportunity to fit Bataille into the existing existentialist-phenomenological tradition (understanding «anguish» as the «anxiety», a key concept in Kierkegaard, Heidegger and Sartre works). The concept of supplice is also rich in connotations: it is primarily about the experience of the crucified Christ at the moment of his cry «in eli lama sabachtani» («why have you forsaken me?»). Bataille refers to this biblical story in order to illustrate the inner experience, but not of Christ himself, but of the Christian, who is filled with the Savior’s suffering, both physical and spiritual. Emphasis was placed on anti-discoursiveness and poeticism as key characteristics of Bataille’s writing, which also contributed to the complication of such a task as the translation of the work «Inner Experience». It is stated that both the translator and the reader of «Inner Experience» should come to terms with the style of wasting words, terms, and connotations in this work. This sacrifice was performed by Bataille repeatedly, and not aimlessly: after all, a new generation of philosophers (among whom J. Baudrillard, J. Derrida, J. Kristeva and M. Foucault) found in him a source of inspiration.

The paper is not about translation of the Bible into Russian, English or French, although its versions are widely presented in the research material. The goal is to compare the biblical discourse on truth and vérité with that of the post-truth era, its modern counterpart signified by the emblematic opposition of fact vs lies. Studying verbalizations of the above-mentioned concept has always been very important for the three cultures, but now, with a post-truth political ideology rising, its relevance for the English language and culture has increased noticeably. We study correlation of the words truth and vérité, pravda (often righteousness), istina (verity) in a number of Bible versions, old and new, to show that semantic consistency between the three cultures may be still achieved indirectly (that is without source texts) in this important area. Taking into account the factor of multiple versions has become essential for English-speaking cultures, it is quite important for the French community, and instructive for the Russian culture in terms of evaluating its consequences. The article presents only quantitative data on the density/variance (or dispersion) of concepts in the same biblical verse and the frequency of lexical ways of its verbalization in different versions of the Bible. The diagnostic value of frequency indicators for a meaningful interpretation is revealed, first, between the three languages; second, between the Old and New Testaments, and third, between their various books. To understand the functional load of the concepts under study in different versions, it is essential to know the frequency of their verbalizers, which sometimes differs greatly even within the same language for many reasons, including a new one – the task to produce a version easy to comprehend. It has been found that, as a rule, the degree of semantic correlation between the concepts under study is high, but in the “easy to read” versions a variability of lexical and syntactic means in the same contexts is significant as well as the intricacy of their refractions. This conclusion is valid, first of all, for the correlations of PRAVDA with its foreign-language counterparts. The form truths, which was not used in the early versions of the Bible, is now admitted by the most recent ones. This probably has to do with the secular philosophy of truth. And, finally, in the latest English-language versions, the word fact – the main competitor of truth in the discourse of the post-truth era – began to appear. This, however, does not refer to the word-combination fact-checking which still seems to be radically hostile to the Bible Truth discourse.

Although the discovering of a complete Palestinian Targum in the Codex Vatican Neofiti 1 (N) erroneously marked in the spine as ‘ Targum Onkelos ’ was not of archaeological but merely archival nature, it was an event of major importance in Aramaic studies. Its announcement by the discoverer, Alejandro Diez Macho, a former student of P. E. Kahle, in Estudios Biblicos, 16, 1956, 446 ff., and Sefarad, 17, 1957, 119 ff., and especially the impressive voluminous publication by the same scholar, Neophyti 1 Targum Palestinense MS de la Biblioteca Vaticana (Madrid-Barcelona, I, Genesis, 1968; II, Exodo, 1970; III, Levitico 1971; IV, Numeros, 1974; v, Deuteronomio, 1978), provided with detailed scholarly introductions to each volume as well as translations of the edited text into Spanish (by the editor), French (by R. Le Déaut) and English (by M. McNamara and M. Maher), aroused great and justified enthusiasm among scholars. Meanwhile, a facsimile edition in 140 copies was published by Makor in Jerusalem (1970), which helped to clear up certain problems in Macho's edition (esp. the omission of the Hebrew lemmata at the beginning of each verse and errors obliterated by the copyists) deplored by David M. Golomb in his recently published thesis, A grammar of Targum Neofiti (p. 1 f.).

ON THE EDGE OF ETERNITY: The Antiquity of the Earth in Medieval and Early Modern Europe by Ivano Dal Prete. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2022. 214 pages of text plus 82 pages of notes, a bibliography, an index, and sixteen pages of black-and-white halftones. Hardcover; $37.99. ISBN: 9780190678890. Kindle; $25.99. ISBN: 9780190678890. *Ivano Dal Prete is a senior lecturer in the History of Science and Medicine program at Yale University. After receiving his doctorate at the University of Verona, he served as a visiting professor at Columbia, Harvard, and Minnesota before coming to Yale. He has published two prior books in Italian on early modern science and its culture. He is also an amateur astronomer and is the co-discoverer of several asteroids. *On the Edge of Eternity is a helpful and also a disturbing book. Dal Prete's explicit purpose "is to take the first steps toward a new paradigm for the history of deep time in Western culture. It aims to replace the view of a relatively recent discovery of the "abyss" of geological time with one that accounts for the complexity, diversity, and social and cultural significance of pre-modern Earth history" (p. 7). *In the process of his detailed narrative, he demonstrates how an originally multi-perspectival conversation could sadly devolve into polemics and escalating polarization, mimicking (or predicting?) what we have seen during the past century and a half. *Dal Prete carefully lays out the groundwork for his narrative in the first two chapters. Chapter 1, "Footprints in the Dust," concisely introduces classical sources such as Eusebius, Augustine, Avicenna, and Boethius, and their late medieval successors including Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas. Of particular interest was the question of whether the world (today we might think of the material universe) was eternal or had a beginning in time (or with time). The question became highlighted following the translation of Aristotle's major works from Arabic into Latin during the twelfth century and played into the theses of the Fourth Lateran Council and later the controversies at the University of Paris during the thirteenth century. As Aquinas put it, reason could not assess whether the earth was eternal or not, but scripture settled the matter with an absolute beginning in time. However, many aspects of Earth history could be made to mesh with either viewpoint. This provided for a multiplicity of opinions and openings for merging empirical observations with philosophical perspective. For example, Noah's Flood could be a global catastrophe or a local catastrophe; further, it could be a singular event or one of many, repeatedly forced by hypothesized interchanges of land and water, hinted at in Aristotle's Meteorologica. *Chapter 2, "The Medieval Earth," summarizes multiple running debates, extending through the fourteenth century. A problematic issue was the origin of mountains. Erosion of highlands was easily observable, and without a mechanism to raise new highlands, the only result could be the washing of the entirety of the exposed earth into the sea. Thus, without such a mechanism, Earth's age would be constrained. But perhaps Aristotelian or Ptolemaic understandings of Earth's figure and the sea-land boundary could be used to support many cycles of erosion and sedimentation, resulting in new uplifts. Claims for astral influences were yet considered possible by many as well. Dal Prete examines the give-and-take between intellectuals such as Jean Buridan, Albert of Saxony, Pierre d'Ailly, and Dante Alighieri, among others. *Chapter 3, "Vernacular Earths, 1250-1500" broadens attention to the northern Italian Renaissance community of the mercantile class, including artisans and engineers, outside the university faculties. During this period, translations of the classical authors into vernacular dialects became widely available, as well as newer encyclopedic summaries of useful knowledge--for example, mathematics, astronomy/astrology, medicine. Coincidently, northern Italy developed as a major mining center, which literally opened up fertile material (rocks) for speculation. The nascent science of stratigraphy was developing, two centuries prior to Steno. Dal Prete convincingly argues that Leonardo da Vinci was not a lone predecessor of modern natural science, as is often depicted, but rather "just the most celebrated representative of an extremely rich and variegated tradition" (p. 77). Further, typifying his cultural milieu, "Leonardo's writings do not provide the slightest hint that the idea of a young Earth ever crossed his mind. The Italian artist failed to bring up the problem not because it was too much an issue, but because it was not an issue at all. While his world was expanding horizontally toward other continents and vertically in the underground, the one dimension that did not need to be enlarged was time" (p. 90). *If this book were a novel, Dal Prete would have now laid the detailed foundation for ensuing confusion, conflict, and misrepresentation. Unfortunately, this is not a novel. Things begin to unwind in chapter 4, "A ‘Pious' History of the Earth? 1500-1650." Here, Dal Prete explicates the creative attempts to formulate a physico-theology for Earth's historical development during the period of the Reformation. Within Reformation-era Protestantism, the principle of Sola scriptura settled the question of Earth's possible eternity. Earth had a definite beginning in (linear) time. But Sola scriptura could be employed to argue for a face-value interpretation of the genealogies of Genesis, plus a 24-hour-day view of the Creation week, to yield a very compressed Creation account. Reflexively, Counter-Reformation scholars, in their efforts to outdo their Protestant counterparts, often employed the same tactics and principles to take back the "high ground." Their efforts were also responses to the great voyages of discovery, which revealed whole segments of humanity previously unknown to the Christian world. What was the relationship of the inhabitants of the New World to the biblical genealogies? A strict appeal to the Flood of Noah as a singular Earth agent provided an anchor for a lineal descent of the American aboriginal population from Noah and therefore from Adam; they were thus inheritors of the Divine image. *Chapter 5, "The Rise of Diluvialism, 1650-1720," expeditiously covers a lot of territory that will be familiar to many of our readers. During this period, early Earth scientists, including Kircher, de Maillet, Aldrovandi, Scilla, Hooke, Burnet, Woodward, Vallisneri, and others grappled with observations of marine fossils in layered rocks exposed in mountains. They pondered a possible relationship to the Noachian Flood, but derived disparate histories. Some retained a modified Aristotelian Earth, with a protracted history of alterations of land and sea. Some natural historians attempted to meld the rock record with a Noachian Flood in a Newtonian gravity-driven world. Others argued for the strictly miraculous nature of the Flood of Noah, that could not be expected to yield a record in the rocks. But overall, "the idea of a ‘Mosaic' natural philosophy met with considerable success, and its influence was profound" (p. 127). *In chapter 6, "The Invention of the History of Deep Time, 1700-1770," Dal Prete examines a diversity of Enlightenment-era historians and philosophers. These vary from Christians (e.g., Leibniz, Calmet) to deists (Voltaire, Buffon) to atheists (de Maillet, Diderot, Boulanger, d'Holbach). Their proposed schemes for cosmic and human prehistory demonstrate varying familiarity with real Earth phenomena, as well as an expansive willingness to speculate beyond the evidence at hand. However, they realized correctly that Earth must be quite old. Unfortunately, the increasingly strident, even vicious, polemics that some of these thinkers offered against the Christian faith engendered a wide range of popular respondents. And unfortunately, many of these respondents easily seized on diluvialist versions of Earth histories to rebut anti-Creation philosophies. Thus, a century and a half before European and American rationalists invented the "warfare" thesis, a popular perception began to emerge that materialist philosophies often went hand-in-glove with the study of nature. *At this point, Dal Prete returns to Venice and northeastern mainland Italy, in chapter 7, "Political Fossils, 1740-1800." Italian translations of works of the French materialists began to appear in northern Italy in 1740. Up until this time, there had existed a strong community involvement in natural history pursuits. These included clergy: the priest Giovanni Giacomo Spada is reported to have put together a collection of fossil fishes (from the nearby site of Monte Bolca, famed among modern paleontologists) that was far superior to that of John Woodward. But after 1740, numerous books appeared arguing the diluvialist cause. Fossils were co-opted as evidences for the Flood and a young age of Earth. Dal Prete carefully chronicles how the political and economic elites of the region "elaborated a diluvialist orthodoxy allegedly supported by ‘true philosophy' and ‘sane science,' which appeared very different from the Earth history many enlightened Catholics conceived only a few decades earlier" (p. 183). *I found this book useful (but disturbing) for three reasons: (1) Dal Prete demonstrates that prior to AD 1700, many serious Christian scholars realized Earth was an old object and saw no theological problem; (2) the classic fairytale of some age-long conflict between Christianity and natural science began to be manufactured during the eighteenth century, long before Draper, White, and others in the later nineteenth century; and (3) Dal Prete demonstrates that the oversimplistic claims and harsh rhetoric of the diluvialists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, provoked by and responding to erudite but self-important atheists, eerily presage the writings of twentieth-century diluvialists. And thus, the magnificence of God's creative activity in deep time is clouded by verbiage. Ouch. *Reviewed by Ralph Stearley, Professor of Geology Emeritus, Calvin University, Grand Rapids, MI 49546.

ON THE EDGE OF ETERNITY: The Antiquity of the Earth in Medieval and Early Modern Europe by Ivano Dal Prete. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2022. 214 pages of text plus 82 pages of notes, a bibliography, an index, and sixteen pages of black-and-white halftones. Hardcover; $37.99. ISBN: 9780190678890. Kindle; $25.99. ISBN: 9780190678890. *Ivano Dal Prete is a senior lecturer in the History of Science and Medicine program at Yale University. After receiving his doctorate at the University of Verona, he served as a visiting professor at Columbia, Harvard, and Minnesota before coming to Yale. He has published two prior books in Italian on early modern science and its culture. He is also an amateur astronomer and is the co-discoverer of several asteroids. *On the Edge of Eternity is a helpful and also a disturbing book. Dal Prete's explicit purpose "is to take the first steps toward a new paradigm for the history of deep time in Western culture. It aims to replace the view of a relatively recent discovery of the "abyss" of geological time with one that accounts for the complexity, diversity, and social and cultural significance of pre-modern Earth history" (p. 7). *In the process of his detailed narrative, he demonstrates how an originally multi-perspectival conversation could sadly devolve into polemics and escalating polarization, mimicking (or predicting?) what we have seen during the past century and a half. *Dal Prete carefully lays out the groundwork for his narrative in the first two chapters. Chapter 1, "Footprints in the Dust," concisely introduces classical sources such as Eusebius, Augustine, Avicenna, and Boethius, and their late medieval successors including Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas. Of particular interest was the question of whether the world (today we might think of the material universe) was eternal or had a beginning in time (or with time). The question became highlighted following the translation of Aristotle's major works from Arabic into Latin during the twelfth century and played into the theses of the Fourth Lateran Council and later the controversies at the University of Paris during the thirteenth century. As Aquinas put it, reason could not assess whether the earth was eternal or not, but scripture settled the matter with an absolute beginning in time. However, many aspects of Earth history could be made to mesh with either viewpoint. This provided for a multiplicity of opinions and openings for merging empirical observations with philosophical perspective. For example, Noah's Flood could be a global catastrophe or a local catastrophe; further, it could be a singular event or one of many, repeatedly forced by hypothesized interchanges of land and water, hinted at in Aristotle's Meteorologica. *Chapter 2, "The Medieval Earth," summarizes multiple running debates, extending through the fourteenth century. A problematic issue was the origin of mountains. Erosion of highlands was easily observable, and without a mechanism to raise new highlands, the only result could be the washing of the entirety of the exposed earth into the sea. Thus, without such a mechanism, Earth's age would be constrained. But perhaps Aristotelian or Ptolemaic understandings of Earth's figure and the sea-land boundary could be used to support many cycles of erosion and sedimentation, resulting in new uplifts. Claims for astral influences were yet considered possible by many as well. Dal Prete examines the give-and-take between intellectuals such as Jean Buridan, Albert of Saxony, Pierre d'Ailly, and Dante Alighieri, among others. *Chapter 3, "Vernacular Earths, 1250-1500" broadens attention to the northern Italian Renaissance community of the mercantile class, including artisans and engineers, outside the university faculties. During this period, translations of the classical authors into vernacular dialects became widely available, as well as newer encyclopedic summaries of useful knowledge--for example, mathematics, astronomy/astrology, medicine. Coincidently, northern Italy developed as a major mining center, which literally opened up fertile material (rocks) for speculation. The nascent science of stratigraphy was developing, two centuries prior to Steno. Dal Prete convincingly argues that Leonardo da Vinci was not a lone predecessor of modern natural science, as is often depicted, but rather "just the most celebrated representative of an extremely rich and variegated tradition" (p. 77). Further, typifying his cultural milieu, "Leonardo's writings do not provide the slightest hint that the idea of a young Earth ever crossed his mind. The Italian artist failed to bring up the problem not because it was too much an issue, but because it was not an issue at all. While his world was expanding horizontally toward other continents and vertically in the underground, the one dimension that did not need to be enlarged was time" (p. 90). *If this book were a novel, Dal Prete would have now laid the detailed foundation for ensuing confusion, conflict, and misrepresentation. Unfortunately, this is not a novel. Things begin to unwind in chapter 4, "A ‘Pious' History of the Earth? 1500-1650." Here, Dal Prete explicates the creative attempts to formulate a physico-theology for Earth's historical development during the period of the Reformation. Within Reformation-era Protestantism, the principle of Sola scriptura settled the question of Earth's possible eternity. Earth had a definite beginning in (linear) time. But Sola scriptura could be employed to argue for a face-value interpretation of the genealogies of Genesis, plus a 24-hour-day view of the Creation week, to yield a very compressed Creation account. Reflexively, Counter-Reformation scholars, in their efforts to outdo their Protestant counterparts, often employed the same tactics and principles to take back the "high ground." Their efforts were also responses to the great voyages of discovery, which revealed whole segments of humanity previously unknown to the Christian world. What was the relationship of the inhabitants of the New World to the biblical genealogies? A strict appeal to the Flood of Noah as a singular Earth agent provided an anchor for a lineal descent of the American aboriginal population from Noah and therefore from Adam; they were thus inheritors of the Divine image. *Chapter 5, "The Rise of Diluvialism, 1650-1720," expeditiously covers a lot of territory that will be familiar to many of our readers. During this period, early Earth scientists, including Kircher, de Maillet, Aldrovandi, Scilla, Hooke, Burnet, Woodward, Vallisneri, and others grappled with observations of marine fossils in layered rocks exposed in mountains. They pondered a possible relationship to the Noachian Flood, but derived disparate histories. Some retained a modified Aristotelian Earth, with a protracted history of alterations of land and sea. Some natural historians attempted to meld the rock record with a Noachian Flood in a Newtonian gravity-driven world. Others argued for the strictly miraculous nature of the Flood of Noah, that could not be expected to yield a record in the rocks. But overall, "the idea of a ‘Mosaic' natural philosophy met with considerable success, and its influence was profound" (p. 127). *In chapter 6, "The Invention of the History of Deep Time, 1700-1770," Dal Prete examines a diversity of Enlightenment-era historians and philosophers. These vary from Christians (e.g., Leibniz, Calmet) to deists (Voltaire, Buffon) to atheists (de Maillet, Diderot, Boulanger, d'Holbach). Their proposed schemes for cosmic and human prehistory demonstrate varying familiarity with real Earth phenomena, as well as an expansive willingness to speculate beyond the evidence at hand. However, they realized correctly that Earth must be quite old. Unfortunately, the increasingly strident, even vicious, polemics that some of these thinkers offered against the Christian faith engendered a wide range of popular respondents. And unfortunately, many of these respondents easily seized on diluvialist versions of Earth histories to rebut anti-Creation philosophies. Thus, a century and a half before European and American rationalists invented the "warfare" thesis, a popular perception began to emerge that materialist philosophies often went hand-in-glove with the study of nature. *At this point, Dal Prete returns to Venice and northeastern mainland Italy, in chapter 7, "Political Fossils, 1740-1800." Italian translations of works of the French materialists began to appear in northern Italy in 1740. Up until this time, there had existed a strong community involvement in natural history pursuits. These included clergy: the priest Giovanni Giacomo Spada is reported to have put together a collection of fossil fishes (from the nearby site of Monte Bolca, famed among modern paleontologists) that was far superior to that of John Woodward. But after 1740, numerous books appeared arguing the diluvialist cause. Fossils were co-opted as evidences for the Flood and a young age of Earth. Dal Prete carefully chronicles how the political and economic elites of the region "elaborated a diluvialist orthodoxy allegedly supported by ‘true philosophy' and ‘sane science,' which appeared very different from the Earth history many enlightened Catholics conceived only a few decades earlier" (p. 183). *I found this book useful (but disturbing) for three reasons: (1) Dal Prete demonstrates that prior to AD 1700, many serious Christian scholars realized Earth was an old object and saw no theological problem; (2) the classic fairytale of some age-long conflict between Christianity and natural science began to be manufactured during the eighteenth century, long before Draper, White, and others in the later nineteenth century; and (3) Dal Prete demonstrates that the oversimplistic claims and harsh rhetoric of the diluvialists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, provoked by and responding to erudite but self-important atheists, eerily presage the writings of twentieth-century diluvialists. And thus, the magnificence of God's creative activity in deep time is clouded by verbiage. Ouch. *Reviewed by Ralph Stearley, Professor of Geology Emeritus, Calvin University, Grand Rapids, MI 49546.

On the text structure and sources of K. Sirvydas’ book of sermons (Punktai sakymų – Punkty Kazań)The Jesuit priest Konstantinas Sirvydas (~1580–1631) was one of the most multitalented and creative intellectuals in Lithuania in the 17th century. Using his vast experience as a professor of Vilnius University and a preacher, he compiled two different versions of a trilingual Latin-Polish-Lithuanian dictionary (~1620 and 1631), and wrote the book of sermons Punktai sakymų (‘Points of Gospel’). The importance of this book of sermons for the Lithuanian culture is immeasurable and it is considered the first book of original sermons written in Lithuanian and the first translation from Lithuanian into another language, i.e. into Polish. This book is often deemed the first original book written in Lithuanian. Unfortunately, its textual structure and its sources have not been properly evaluated and described yet. When preparing this scientific edition of his book, it appeared that its text is mostly comprised of: (1) citations from the Holy Scriptures, and paraphrases and allusions to them; (2) citations and paraphrases or allusions to works by the Church Fathers, Saints, Roman authors, etc.; and, finally, (3) Sirvydas’ original text – his commentaries and interpretations on citations, etc. There are citations from most of the books of the Old and New Testament. In his book Sirvydas uses 150 different biblical names. He also quotes from the Church Fathers, French theologians and thinkers, and from the Saints. We mostly find exact word-byword citations from Vulgate in his sermons – not paraphrases or allusions. These citations are the first published fragments from the Holy Scriptures in Lithuanian in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. With this background information we may to hypothesize that during the first quarter of the 17th century, there might have existed an unknown translation (probably some manuscript) of the Holy Scriptures in Lithuanian. О тексте и источниках сборника проповедей Punktai sakymų (Punkty kazań) Константина ШирвидаKoнстантин Ширвид (~ 1580–1631) однa из самых универсальных и интеллектуальных личностей, живших и работавших в XVII веке в Литве. K. Ширвид подготовил два издания словаря Dicionarium trium linguarum (~ 1620, 1631) и издал проповеди в виде пунктов Punktai sakymų (PS). Значение PS для литовской культуры огромно. PS считаются первым оригинальным сборником проповедей в Литве и первой литовской книгой, переведенной на польский язык. Однако до сих пор cтoль важный для литовской культуры текст не был изучен и подробно описан. В процессе анализа текста выяснилось, что структура его довольно многогранна. Текст PS состоит из нескольких слоев: (1) цитат и аллюзий Библии; (2) цитат трудов отцов Церкви, цитат или аллюзий других авторов: римских писателей, протестантских авторов, святых; (3) авторского текста самого К. Ширвида, который часто принимает форму комментария к приведенным цитатам. Автор в тексте проповедей цитирует большинство книг Ветхого и Нового Завета. В проповеди упомянуто 150 библейских имен. К. Ширвид цитирует также отцов Церкви и французских богословов и мыслителей, святых. Цитаты из Ветхого и Нового Завета являются одним из первых фрагментов перевода на литовский язык Святого Писания в Великом княжестве Литовском.

PHYSICO-THEOLOGY: Religion and Science in Europe, 1650-1750 by Ann Blair and Kaspar von Greyerz, eds. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020. 274 pages, including bibliography and index. Hardcover; $54.95. ISBN: 9781421438467. *What is physico-theology? Is it merely a peculiar term for what is more generally known as natural theology? Physico-theology makes its clearest first appearances in John Ray's Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of Creation (1691), Miscellaneous Discourses (1692), and Three Physico-Theological Discourses (1713). It also appears in William Derham's Physico-Theology (1713) and Astro-Theology (1715). Historically, these works set the standard for what the authors of Blair and Greyerz's edited collection of papers include within "physico-theology." Using these titles as a guide makes it possible to judge that, while Walter Charleton's earlier book The Darkness of Atheism Dispelled by the Light of Nature: A Physico-Theologicall Treatise (1652) uses the expression, it is not found consistently within the genre; many other books that do not employ the technical term still belong within the tradition. If Ray had any predecessor, it is likely Robert Boyle, as Katherine Calloway argues from Boyle's Disquistion about Final Causes (1688). Her emphasis on this book, rather than Boyle's other earlier "physico-" titled books, is appropriate because it emphasizes not only the teleological aspect of physico-theology, but more importantly the empirical drive. *It is a small oversight in this collection that there was no chapter devoted entirely to Boyle, given how well he fits within the physico-theological genre. Henry More's Antidote against Atheism (1653) is frequently discussed in the collection as a possible forerunner of physico-theology. Calloway even shows that Ray follows him in the order of his arguments. However, she is right to say that More's Platonism is antithetical to the empirical impulse of physico-theological writers. Peter Harrison sets the term physico-theology etymologically in the company of similar words such as "physico-medical," "astro-theology," and "insecto-theology," all current through the period examined. These novel terms signal disciplinary boundary crossing where "physico-" is the catch-all for the many specialized "theologies" from nature. They explore the liminal zone of the questions of creation, generation, and eschatology in their most developed forms of those theologies. *Kaspar von Greyerz explains that by 1728 physico-theology was now firmly established, as evidenced by the editorial work of Johann Fabricius in his translation of Derham's Astro-Theology. Added to the translation was a bibliography of related works that Fabricius used to establish physico-theology within an older and more robust pedigree. In numerous new editions up until 1765, he increased this bibliography to seventy-five pages. Fabricius can include so many related works because he had a broader notion of physico-theology that reinforced "recognition of, as well as love and respect for, the creator." This seems to be a continuation of the theme in the German context as shown by Kathleen Crowther in the work of Jakob Horst, a seventeenth-century German Lutheran. *So, is there a difference between physico-theology and natural theology? Scott Mandelbrote suggests that while both are concerned with divine design and purpose, physico-theology tends to emphasize special providence or care. Several of the contributors to this volume also emphasize the apologetic role this played either against the bare mechanism that was attributed to Descartes or atheism more generally. Rienk Vermij holds that physico-theology was more about nature, whereas natural theology about theology, supported, in part, by the fact that it was primarily natural philosophers and naturalists who wrote on the subject, not theologians. In his examination of two physicians who wrote on physico-theology, the Dutch Bernard Nieuwentijt and the German Johann Jakob Scheuchzer, Vermij argues that physico-theology seeks to inform the interpretation of nature through the Bible. In contrast, in natural theology, it is nature informing one's knowledge of God. *In reality, many writers in the physico-theology genre are skeptical of the possibility of natural theology. Some of the most insightful chapters in this book were those in which theology was understood as a motivation and foundation for studying nature. Anne-Charlott Trepp noted that the Lutheran ubiquity of Christ in the sacrament of the Lord's Supper was no less a ubiquity of Christ in nature, grounding the possibility of physico-theology. Further, the Pietist emphasis on experience in religious life was conducive to empirical study. "For, as God revealed himself through the materialized word in every individual creature, individual things immanent to the world, even the lowest in nature's hierarchy, gained a new dignity and transcendence not least in their bodily presence and materiality" (p. 133). *Martine Pécharman's treatment of Blaise Pascal's rejection of natural theology shows that the Jansenist Pascal proved more Calvinist than many of the English authors innate to the physico-theological project. Pécharman reveals how the early editors of Pascal's Pensées obscured both his skepticism about the sinful human's ability to rightly read the divine in nature, and also obscured Pascal's remark that the creation was insufficient to bring one to salvation. Instead, as Pascal said, nature alone will lead one to atheism or deism. This is, in fact, what happened not long after, as John Brooke notes, among the English Latitudinarians. Nöel-Antoine Pluche, another Jansenist, also avoids teleological arguments, as Nicolas Brucker explains. Pluche's survey work, The Spectacle of Nature, was aimed at an elite French audience. "The question is rather how to know more about Creation, and therefore how to better revere the Creator" (p. 189). This theme of wonder leading to reverence permeates all physico-theological writers. *Physico-theology, even when not named as such, was also an active part of defenses against the early stages of biblical criticism (e.g., Spinoza and La Peyrère). Eric Jorink describes the detailed work of the Dutch author Willem Goeree, who used math and engineering to reconstruct a plausible Noah's Ark. Jorink briefly mentions Kircher's earlier attempt, but it would have been interesting to compare the two authors on that subject: a Dutch Calvinist and a German Jesuit. Did physico-theology join them or divide them? Antonio Vallisneri, a naturalist at the University of Padua, struggled to reconcile fossils, geological formations, and the Flood. Brendan Dooley shows that, at least in Vallisneri's work, physico-theology was not always, even if predominantly, adulatory toward divine providence. Vallisneri was comfortable with unresolved questions of fossils and the Flood. *John Brooke, in his chapter "Was Physico-Theology Bad Theology and Bad Science?," succumbs to the presentism he seeks to undermine with that provocative title. Regarding "bad science," he judges that while the proponents of physico-theology were all leaders in their fields, they were unduly "anthropocentric" in their reading of nature. Yet, when he comes to answer the question of "bad theology," he says it is a question that cannot be answered, since it is contingent on one's theological stripe. Why, one may ask, did he not rate science by the same standard, admitting his own scientific prejudice against the "anthropocentrism" of divine design, as if it somehow reduced the quality of the science? Despite this bias, Brooke adds an important theological insight in that design arguments that highlight divine care tend to pass too quickly over sin and natural evil. Pascal, as noted above, was an exception to this rule. *Brian Ogilvie, looking at several authors doing "insecto-theology," does not see the design theme as anthropocentrism, but rather that the attention of physico-theologians to function and design in insect morphology and behavior fostered genuine contributions to the field. Aesthetic values can be as much a part of what one brings to and takes away from physico-theology. Simona Boscani Leoni shows this happening as the perception of the Swiss Alps went from jagged and ugly to praiseworthy--a physico-theology of mountains moving in parallel with that trajectory. A deeper look into a connection between physico-theology of the mountains and Albrecht von Haller's poem Die Alpen (1732) would have been interesting here, especially given Haller's Swiss Calvinism and active role in questions of natural philosophy and religion. In botany, as "form" comes to serve the interests of beauty more than function, physico-theology can become unnecessary, as Jonathan Sheehan shows in an investigation of studies of flowers during this time. *This volume presents the subject with excellent variety, yet editorially holds together well, serving as an introduction to the intellectual phenomenon of physico-theology. Chapters sometimes overlap in their discussion of key works of the period, but this happily serves to connect them together. Like the disciplinary boundary crossing which is physico-theology, this collection of papers, handling authors mostly writing in the period 1690-1740--neither really "Scientific Revolution" or "Enlightenment" in our usual historical categories--gives insight into a generation that might otherwise be undervalued because it does not easily fit into either. It is a liminal zone where interesting natural experiments can happen. *Reviewed by Jason M. Rampelt, PhD from the University of Cambridge, Edgeworth, PA 15143.

This article presents a new account of Richard Simon's work as a biblical translator. Having first contextualised Simon's views on the vernacular Bible in the contested world of late seventeenth-century French Catholic biblical translation, it then examines how they were engaged with and disputed by contemporaries (in particular, Antoine Arnauld). It contends that Simon's novelty did not consist in applying history and philology to the Bible in order to reach a confessionally neutral version, but rather in reconceptualising the relationship between multiple legitimate biblical translations to craft a new form of Catholic vernacular Bible.

AbstractThis essay surveys a generation of scholarship since the death of Beryl Smalley, pioneer in the study of the medieval reception of the bible, in 1984. We try to give a fair representation of work produced in English, French, German, and Italian over the last thirty years. We report on: 1) editions, tools, and translations, 2) surveys and synthetic treatments, 3) work on medieval biblical hermeneutics, 4) studies of periods and individuals, 5) thematic studies and studies of biblical books and pericopes across broad periods, and 6) comparative work on Muslim, Jewish, and Christian exegesis. We describe a rapidly growing quantity of knowledge and expanding perspectives on biblical interpretation in medieval culture. We conclude with suggestions for future research.

The purpose of the article is to reveal the symbolic foundations of Ch. Alkan's second chamber concerto op. 10, which are also the basis for the composer's subsequent opuses. Chamber concerts are not sufficiently covered by foreign researchers and are unknown in our musicology, therefore this study is relevant both as an example of early manifestations of symbolism in Ch. Alkan's work (romanticism), which was a precursor to the French symbolist composers who studied his work (for example, Debussy), and from a performance perspective. The research methodology is based on the use of systemic and structural, analytical, semiotic, hermeneutical, biographical and historical, comparative analyses to identify the symbolic foundations and indexical and iconic signs of Ch. Alkan's second concerto da camera cis-moll op.10. Scientific novelty of the study is that for the first time, the theory about the origin of Ch. Alkan's symbolic style, starting with Concerto da camera No. 2 op. 10, is presented, including the method of letter-note encryption of the composer's musical language, based on the historical and cultural perspective of such examples, which come from the combinatorics of the Middle Ages and the wit of the Baroque, biblical numerology and sacred calculus in the cultures of ancient civilisations. In addition to the Second Chamber Concerto cis-moll op. 10, the composer used this method in his other works, such as the paraphrase “Super Flumina Babylonis” op. 52 or the Grand Sonata “Four Ages” op. 33. The proposed concept of the figurative sphere of the work can be used in the construction of performing interpretations. Conclusions. Ch. Alkan's Second Concerto da Camera op.10 cis-moll is one of the first works in which we find the first manifestations of symbolism in the composer's work. In it, the composer begins to use one of the Baroque principles of endowing its constituent elements with symbolism, showing in a somewhat pathetic style (“Trois Morceaux Dans le Genre Pathétique” will appear in the subsequent opuses) the search for his place in the world and the state of his soul, the polarity and at the same time the unity of the forces that govern the universe. The second concerto da camera outlined a special thematic line in Ch. Alkan's work, dedicated to the work on the individual and the preaching of Salvation in Christ, continued in the “Grand Sonata” op. 33, as well as in “Benedictus” op. 54, in which we observe the Baroque principles of inventing difficulties, playing with numbers, notes and words for the sake of playing. The above works show the complexity of the cipher compared to the second chamber concerto, which is explained by the author's continuous deepening of encyclopaedic knowledge, his awareness of the Apocrypha, ancient manuscripts in Greek, Latin and Syriac, translations of the Bible into French, and works of Greek philosophers. The art of solving musical riddles formed the essential basis of Ch. Alkan’s language, which can only be solved by people with the same encyclopaedic knowledge. Key words: Charles Alkan, concerto da camera, semantics, symbolism, creative method.

AbstractLatin and Old French exhibit a fairly similar range of constructions emphasizing the Topic: Topicalizations and Left-Dislocations. Our aim is to investigate the hypothesis of a continuity from Latin to Romance languages. In this context we look into the data provided by the Vulgate. Indeed Jerome's choices in his translation of the Biblical texts reveal the level of vitality of each construction.Actually Jerome chooses Topicalizations rather than Left-Dislocations, although Left-Dislocations were the usual way of emphasizing Topics in Biblical Hebrew. After a summary of Archaic and Classical Latin constructions, we compare Jerome's strategies on the one hand with the data from Vetus Latina, on the other hand with some contemporary texts, such as Augustine's

This article examines biblical allusions in Simone Weil's “On the Right Use of School Studies,” in which she argues that study can train our attention to God and neighbor. Focusing on Weil's use of Jesus' teachings that mention bread, meals, and table service, this article reveals an underlying theme of Eucharist (communion) in Weil's essay on study. Together with Weil's comment that studies are “like a sacrament,” this analysis suggests that Weil offers a “eucharistic pedagogy” shaped by her mystical theology of Eucharist, a theology itself shaped by George Herbert's English-language poem “Love.” Throughout, the article compares Weil's original French with its English translation, noting where the translation obscures her use of the Bible or her theology, and it also examines the Greek biblical text, since Weil read the New Testament in its Greek original. The article concludes with a critique of Weil's educational vision, which relies on a dyadic vision of eucharist, and suggests that a communal vision of eucharist can support a social vision of education.

In this article, the authors propose to analyse the ways in which religion and sexuality are related to one another in three recent novels: (1) Fransi Phillips’s Die donker god (2007), (2) Inga Žolude’s Santa Biblia (2013) and (3) Michel Houellebecq’s Soumission [English translation: Submission] (2015). In each case, the novels are briefly placed within their respective literary cultures (Afrikaans, Latvian and French) in order to offer a contextually sensitive analysis. After each of the novels has been discussed related to the three related topoi of God, sex and joy, some comparative remarks are offered in conclusion.Intradisciplinary and/or interdisciplinary implications: In this contribution, from the theological field of Spirituality Studies, the field of Comparative Literature is approached, seeking to identify aspects of Religiosity and Sexuality from the perspective of Post-Secularity.

Background: The most well-known usage of the term μονογενής is in the spiritually admired hymn Omonogenyc Uioc ke Logoc tw :ew and the most frequently used clergy blessing, ‘f’cmarwout ‘nje pefmonogenyc ‘nsyri. It has been noticed that in many of the liturgical books that have been written in Arabic, μονογενής is often translated as ‘the only race وحيد الجنس, which does not reflect the essence of the term μονογενής. Methods: We hereby provide biblical, Old Testament and New Testament, liturgical books and common prayer book (Agpya) evidence for the exact meaning of the term μονογενής with its Greek references. These quotations prove that the accurate meaning of the term μονογενής is the Only Begotten which is الوحيد. Conclusion: The term μονογενής means the Only Begotten and not race, as translated in Arabic. Such accurate translation has important theological meaning hence should be adhered to. French: Contexte: L’utilisation la plus connue du terme μονογενής se trouve dans l’hymne spirituellement admiré Omonogenyc Uioc ke Logoc tw :ew, et dans la bénédiction du clergé la plus fréquemment utilisée, ‘f’cmarwout ‘nje pefmonogenyc ‘nsyri. Il a été remarqué que dans de nombreux livres liturgiques écrits en arabe, μονογενής est souvent traduit par ‘de race unique وحيد الجنس’, ce qui ne reflète pas l’essence du terme μονογενής. Méthodes: Nous fournissons ici des preuves bibliques, de l’Ancien Testament et du Nouveau Testament, des livres liturgiques et du livre des prières communes (Agpya) de la signification exacte du terme μονογενής avec ses références grecques. Ces citations prouvent que la signification exacte du terme μονογενής est le Fils Unique, qui est الوحيد. Conclusion: Le terme μονογενής signifie le Fils Unique et non la race, comme traduit en arabe. Une telle traduction précise a une signification théologique importante et doit donc être adoptée. German: Hintergrund: Die bekannteste Verwendung des Begriffs μονογενής findet sich in der geistlich bewunderten Hymne Omonogenyc Uioc ke Logoc tw :ew und dem am häufigsten verwendeten klerikalen Segen ‘f’cmarwout ‘nje pefmonogenyc ‘nsyri. Es wurde festgestellt, dass in vielen liturgischen Büchern, die in arabischer Sprache verfasst wurden, μονογενής oft mit "die einzige Rasse وحيد الجنس" übersetzt wird, was dem Wesen des Begriffs μονογενής nicht gerecht wird. Methodik: Wir liefern hiermit Beweise aus biblischen Texten, liturgischen Bücher und dem gemeinsamen Gebetsbuch (Agpya) für die genaue Bedeutung des Begriffs μονογενής mit seinen griechischen Referenzen. Diese Zitate beweisen, dass die genaue Bedeutung des Begriffs μονογενής der Einziggeborene Sohn ist, الوحيد. Schlussfolgerung: Der Begriff "μονογενής" bedeutet "der Einziggeborene" und nicht "Rasse", wie es im Arabischen heißt. Diese genaue Übersetzung hat eine wichtige theologische Bedeutung und sollte daher beibehalten werden. Italian: Background: L’uso più noto del termine μονογενής è nell’apprezzato inno spirituale Omonogenyc Uioc ke Logoc tw :ew e nella benedizione del clero più frequentemente usata. ‘f’cmarwout ‘nje pefmonogenyc ‘nsyri. È stato notato che in molti libri liturgici scritti in lingua araba μονογενής è spesso tradotta in ‘unico nel genere’ وحيد الجنس, il quale non corrisponde all’essenza del termine μονογενής. Metodi: con il presente studio forniamo delle evidenze bibliche, dall’antico e dal nuovo testamento, dai libri liturgici e dal comune libro delle preghiere orarie (Agpya) per il significato preciso del termine μονογενής con i riferimenti in lingua greca. Queste citazioni attestano che il significato accurato del termine μονογενής è Unigenito vale a dire الوحيد. Conclusione: il termine μονογενής significa Unigenito e non genere, come tradotto in Arabo. Tale traduzione accurata ha un’importante significato teologico e deve essere pertanto adottata. Keywords: μονογενής; Only Begotten; Coptic

Biology teaches us that organisms adapt—or don’t; sociology claims that people adapt—or don’t. We know that ideas can adapt; sometimes even institutions can adapt. Or not. Various papers in this issue attest in exciting ways to precisely such adaptations and maladaptations. (See, for example, the articles in this issue by Lelia Green, Leesa Bonniface, and Tami McMahon, by Lexey A. Bartlett, and by Debra Ferreday.) Adaptation is a part of nature and culture, but it’s the latter alone that interests me here. (However, see the article by Hutcheon and Bortolotti for a discussion of nature and culture together.) It’s no news to anyone that not only adaptations, but all art is bred of other art, though sometimes artists seem to get carried away. My favourite example of excess of association or attribution can be found in the acknowledgements page to a verse drama called Beatrice Chancy by the self-defined “maximalist” (not minimalist) poet, novelist, librettist, and critic, George Elliot Clarke. His selected list of the incarnations of the story of Beatrice Cenci, a sixteenth-century Italian noblewoman put to death for the murder of her father, includes dramas, romances, chronicles, screenplays, parodies, sculptures, photographs, and operas: dramas by Vincenzo Pieracci (1816), Percy Bysshe Shelley (1819), Juliusz Slowacki (1843), Waldter Landor (1851), Antonin Artaud (1935) and Alberto Moravia (1958); the romances by Francesco Guerrazi (1854), Henri Pierangeli (1933), Philip Lindsay (1940), Frederic Prokosch (1955) and Susanne Kircher (1976); the chronicles by Stendhal (1839), Mary Shelley (1839), Alexandre Dumas, père (1939-40), Robert Browning (1864), Charles Swinburne (1883), Corrado Ricci (1923), Sir Lionel Cust (1929), Kurt Pfister (1946) and Irene Mitchell (1991); the film/screenplay by Bertrand Tavernier and Colo O’Hagan (1988); the parody by Kathy Acker (1993); the sculpture by Harriet Hosmer (1857); the photograph by Julia Ward Cameron (1866); and the operas by Guido Pannain (1942), Berthold Goldschmidt (1951, 1995) and Havergal Brian (1962). (Beatrice Chancy, 152) He concludes the list with: “These creators have dallied with Beatrice Cenci, but I have committed indiscretions” (152). An “intertextual feast”, by Clarke’s own admission, this rewriting of Beatrice’s story—especially Percy Bysshe Shelley’s own verse play, The Cenci—illustrates brilliantly what Northrop Frye offered as the first principle of the production of literature: “literature can only derive its form from itself” (15). But in the last several decades, what has come to be called intertextuality theory has shifted thinking away from looking at this phenomenon from the point of view of authorial influences on the writing of literature (and works like Harold Bloom’s famous study of the Anxiety of Influence) and toward considering our readerly associations with literature, the connections we (not the author) make—as we read. We, the readers, have become “empowered”, as we say, and we’ve become the object of academic study in our own right. Among the many associations we inevitably make, as readers, is with adaptations of the literature we read, be it of Jane Austin novels or Beowulf. Some of us may have seen the 2006 rock opera of Beowulf done by the Irish Repertory Theatre; others await the new Neil Gaiman animated film. Some may have played the Beowulf videogame. I personally plan to miss the upcoming updated version that makes Beowulf into the son of an African explorer. But I did see Sturla Gunnarsson’s Beowulf and Grendel film, and yearned to see the comic opera at the Lincoln Centre Festival in 2006 called Grendel, the Transcendence of the Great Big Bad. I am not really interested in whether these adaptations—all in the last year or so—signify Hollywood’s need for a new “monster of the week” or are just the sign of a desire to cash in on the success of The Lord of the Rings. For all I know they might well act as an ethical reminder of the human in the alien in a time of global strife (see McGee, A4). What interests me is the impact these multiple adaptations can have on the reader of literature as well as on the production of literature. Literature, like painting, is usually thought of as what Nelson Goodman (114) calls a one-stage art form: what we read (like what we see on a canvas) is what is put there by the originating artist. Several major consequences follow from this view. First, the implication is that the work is thus an original and new creation by that artist. However, even the most original of novelists—like Salman Rushdie—are the first to tell you that stories get told and retold over and over. Indeed his controversial novel, The Satanic Verses, takes this as a major theme. Works like the Thousand and One Nights are crucial references in all of his work. As he writes in Haroun and the Sea of Stories: “no story comes from nowhere; new stories are born of old” (86). But illusion of originality is only one of the implications of seeing literature as a one-stage art form. Another is the assumption that what the writer put on paper is what we read. But entire doctoral programs in literary production and book history have been set up to study how this is not the case, in fact. Editors influence, even change, what authors want to write. Designers control how we literally see the work of literature. Beatrice Chancy’s bookend maps of historical Acadia literally frame how we read the historical story of the title’s mixed-race offspring of an African slave and a white slave owner in colonial Nova Scotia in 1801. Media interest or fashion or academic ideological focus may provoke a publisher to foreground in the physical presentation different elements of a text like this—its stress on race, or gender, or sexuality. The fact that its author won Canada’s Governor General’s Award for poetry might mean that the fact that this is a verse play is emphasised. If the book goes into a second edition, will a new preface get added, changing the framework for the reader once again? As Katherine Larson has convincingly shown, the paratextual elements that surround a work of literature like this one become a major site of meaning generation. What if literature were not a one-stage an art form at all? What if it were, rather, what Goodman calls “two-stage” (114)? What if we accept that other artists, other creators, are needed to bring it to life—editors, publishers, and indeed readers? In a very real and literal sense, from our (audience) point of view, there may be no such thing as a one-stage art work. Just as the experience of literature is made possible for readers by the writer, in conjunction with a team of professional and creative people, so, arguably all art needs its audience to be art; the un-interpreted, un-experienced art work is not worth calling art. Goodman resists this move to considering literature a two-stage art, not at all sure that readings are end products the way that performance works are (114). Plays, films, television shows, or operas would be his prime examples of two-stage arts. In each of these, a text (a playtext, a screenplay, a score, a libretto) is moved from page to stage or screen and given life, by an entire team of creative individuals: directors, actors, designers, musicians, and so on. Literary adaptations to the screen or stage are usually considered as yet another form of this kind of transcription or transposition of a written text to a performance medium. But the verbal move from the “book” to the diminutive “libretto” (in Italian, little book or booklet) is indicative of a view that sees adaptation as a step downward, a move away from a primary literary “source”. In fact, an entire negative rhetoric of “infidelity” has developed in both journalistic reviewing and academic discourse about adaptations, and it is a morally loaded rhetoric that I find surprising in its intensity. Here is the wonderfully critical description of that rhetoric by the king of film adaptation critics, Robert Stam: Terms like “infidelity,” “betrayal,” “deformation,” “violation,” “bastardisation,” “vulgarisation,” and “desecration” proliferate in adaptation discourse, each word carrying its specific charge of opprobrium. “Infidelity” carries overtones of Victorian prudishness; “betrayal” evokes ethical perfidy; “bastardisation” connotes illegitimacy; “deformation” implies aesthetic disgust and monstrosity; “violation” calls to mind sexual violence; “vulgarisation” conjures up class degradation; and “desecration” intimates religious sacrilege and blasphemy. (3) I join many others today, like Stam, in challenging the persistence of this fidelity discourse in adaptation studies, thereby providing yet another example of what, in his article here called “The Persistence of Fidelity: Adaptation Theory Today,” John Connor has called the “fidelity reflex”—the call to end an obsession with fidelity as the sole criterion for judging the success of an adaptation. But here I want to come at this same issue of the relation of adaptation to the adapted text from another angle. When considering an adaptation of a literary work, there are other reasons why the literary “source” text might be privileged. Literature has historical priority as an art form, Stam claims, and so in some people’s eyes will always be superior to other forms. But does it actually have priority? What about even earlier performative forms like ritual and song? Or to look forward, instead of back, as Tim Barker urges us to do in his article here, what about the new media’s additions to our repertoire with the advent of electronic technology? How can we retain this hierarchy of artistic forms—with literature inevitably on top—in a world like ours today? How can both the Romantic ideology of original genius and the capitalist notion of individual authorship hold up in the face of the complex reality of the production of literature today (as well as in the past)? (In “Amen to That: Sampling and Adapting the Past”, Steve Collins shows how digital technology has changed the possibilities of musical creativity in adapting/sampling.) Like many other ages before our own, adaptation is rampant today, as director Spike Jonze and screenwriter Charlie Kaufman clearly realised in creating Adaptation, their meta-cinematic illustration-as-send-up film about adaptation. But rarely has a culture denigrated the adapter as a secondary and derivative creator as much as we do the screenwriter today—as Jonze explores with great irony. Michelle McMerrin and Sergio Rizzo helpfully explain in their pieces here that one of the reasons for this is the strength of auteur theory in film criticism. But we live in a world in which works of literature have been turned into more than films. We now have literary adaptations in the forms of interactive new media works and videogames; we have theme parks; and of course, we have the more common television series, radio and stage plays, musicals, dance works, and operas. And, of course, we now have novelisations of films—and they are not given the respect that originary novels are given: it is the adaptation as adaptation that is denigrated, as Deborah Allison shows in “Film/Print: Novelisations and Capricorn One”. Adaptations across media are inevitably fraught, and for complex and multiple reasons. The financing and distribution issues of these widely different media alone inevitably challenge older capitalist models. The need or desire to appeal to a global market has consequences for adaptations of literature, especially with regard to its regional and historical specificities. These particularities are what usually get adapted or “indigenised” for new audiences—be they the particularities of the Spanish gypsy Carmen (see Ioana Furnica, “Subverting the ‘Good, Old Tune’”), those of the Japanese samurai genre (see Kevin P. Eubanks, “Becoming-Samurai: Samurai [Films], Kung-Fu [Flicks] and Hip-Hop [Soundtracks]”), of American hip hop graffiti (see Kara-Jane Lombard, “‘To Us Writers, the Differences Are Obvious’: The Adaptation of Hip Hop Graffiti to an Australian Context”) or of Jane Austen’s fiction (see Suchitra Mathur, “From British ‘Pride’ to Indian ‘Bride’: Mapping the Contours of a Globalised (Post?)Colonialism”). What happens to the literary text that is being adapted, often multiple times? Rather than being displaced by the adaptation (as is often feared), it most frequently gets a new life: new editions of the book appear, with stills from the movie adaptation on its cover. But if I buy and read the book after seeing the movie, I read it differently than I would have before I had seen the film: in effect, the book, not the adaptation, has become the second and even secondary text for me. And as I read, I can only “see” characters as imagined by the director of the film; the cinematic version has taken over, has even colonised, my reader’s imagination. The literary “source” text, in my readerly, experiential terms, becomes the secondary work. It exists on an experiential continuum, in other words, with its adaptations. It may have been created before, but I only came to know it after. What if I have read the literary work first, and then see the movie? In my imagination, I have already cast the characters: I know what Gabriel and Gretta Conroy of James Joyce’s story, “The Dead,” look and sound like—in my imagination, at least. Then along comes John Huston’s lush period piece cinematic adaptation and the director superimposes his vision upon mine; his forcibly replaces mine. But, in this particular case, Huston still arguably needs my imagination, or at least my memory—though he may not have realised it fully in making the film. When, in a central scene in the narrative, Gabriel watches his wife listening, moved, to the singing of the Irish song, “The Lass of Aughrim,” what we see on screen is a concerned, intrigued, but in the end rather blank face: Gabriel doesn’t alter his expression as he listens and watches. His expression may not change—but I know exactly what he is thinking. Huston does not tell us; indeed, without the use of voice-over, he cannot. And since the song itself is important, voice-over is impossible. But I know exactly what he is thinking: I’ve read the book. I fill in the blank, so to speak. Gabriel looks at Gretta and thinks: There was grace and mystery in her attitude as if she were a symbol of something. He asked himself what is a woman standing on the stairs in the shadow, listening to distant music, a symbol of. If he were a painter he would paint her in that attitude. … Distant Music he would call the picture if he were a painter. (210) A few pages later the narrator will tell us: At last she turned towards them and Gabriel saw that there was colour on her cheeks and that her eyes were shining. A sudden tide of joy went leaping out of his heart. (212) This joy, of course, puts him in a very different—disastrously different—state of mind than his wife, who (we later learn) is remembering a young man who sang that song to her when she was a girl—and who died, for love of her. I know this—because I’ve read the book. Watching the movie, I interpret Gabriel’s blank expression in this knowledge. Just as the director’s vision can colonise my visual and aural imagination, so too can I, as reader, supplement the film’s silence with the literary text’s inner knowledge. The question, of course, is: should I have to do so? Because I have read the book, I will. But what if I haven’t read the book? Will I substitute my own ideas, from what I’ve seen in the rest of the film, or from what I’ve experienced in my own life? Filmmakers always have to deal with this problem, of course, since the camera is resolutely externalising, and actors must reveal their inner worlds through bodily gesture or facial expression for the camera to record and for the spectator to witness and comprehend. But film is not only a visual medium: it uses music and sound, and it also uses words—spoken words within the dramatic situation, words overheard on the street, on television, but also voice-over words, spoken by a narrating figure. Stephen Dedalus escapes from Ireland at the end of Joseph Strick’s 1978 adaptation of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man with the same words as he does in the novel, where they appear as Stephen’s diary entry: Amen. So be it. Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race. … Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead. (253) The words from the novel also belong to the film as film, with its very different story, less about an artist than about a young Irishman finally able to escape his family, his religion and his country. What’s deliberately NOT in the movie is the irony of Joyce’s final, benign-looking textual signal to his reader: Dublin, 1904 Trieste, 1914 The first date is the time of Stephen’s leaving Dublin—and the time of his return, as we know from the novel Ulysses, the sequel, if you like, to this novel. The escape was short-lived! Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man has an ironic structure that has primed its readers to expect not escape and triumph but something else. Each chapter of the novel has ended on this kind of personal triumphant high; the next has ironically opened with Stephen mired in the mundane and in failure. Stephen’s final words in both film and novel remind us that he really is an Icarus figure, following his “Old father, old artificer”, his namesake, Daedalus. And Icarus, we recall, takes a tumble. In the novel version, we are reminded that this is the portrait of the artist “as a young man”—later, in 1914, from the distance of Trieste (to which he has escaped) Joyce, writing this story, could take some ironic distance from his earlier persona. There is no such distance in the film version. However, it stands alone, on its own; Joyce’s irony is not appropriate in Strick’s vision. His is a different work, with its own message and its own, considerably more romantic and less ironic power. Literary adaptations are their own things—inspired by, based on an adapted text but something different, something other. I want to argue that these works adapted from literature are now part of our readerly experience of that literature, and for that reason deserve the same attention we give to the literary, and not only the same attention, but also the same respect. I am a literarily trained person. People like me who love words, already love plays, but shouldn’t we also love films—and operas, and musicals, and even videogames? There is no need to denigrate words that are heard (and visualised) in order to privilege words that are read. Works of literature can have afterlives in their adaptations and translations, just as they have pre-lives, in terms of influences and models, as George Eliot Clarke openly allows in those acknowledgements to Beatrice Chancy. I want to return to that Canadian work, because it raises for me many of the issues about adaptation and language that I see at the core of our literary distrust of the move away from the written, printed text. I ended my recent book on adaptation with a brief examination of this work, but I didn’t deal with this particular issue of language. So I want to return to it, as to unfinished business. Clarke is, by the way, clear in the verse drama as well as in articles and interviews that among the many intertexts to Beatrice Chancy, the most important are slave narratives, especially one called Celia, a Slave, and Shelley’s play, The Cenci. Both are stories of mistreated and subordinated women who fight back. Since Clarke himself has written at length about the slave narratives, I’m going to concentrate here on Shelley’s The Cenci. The distance from Shelley’s verse play to Clarke’s verse play is a temporal one, but it is also geographic and ideological one: from the old to the new world, and from a European to what Clarke calls an “Africadian” (African Canadian/African Acadian) perspective. Yet both poets were writing political protest plays against unjust authority and despotic power. And they have both become plays that are more read than performed—a sad fate, according to Clarke, for two works that are so concerned with voice. We know that Shelley sought to calibrate the stylistic registers of his work with various dramatic characters and effects to create a modern “mixed” style that was both a return to the ancients and offered a new drama of great range and flexibility where the expression fits what is being expressed (see Bruhn). His polemic against eighteenth-century European dramatic conventions has been seen as leading the way for realist drama later in the nineteenth century, with what has been called its “mixed style mimesis” (Bruhn) Clarke’s adaptation does not aim for Shelley’s perfect linguistic decorum. It mixes the elevated and the biblical with the idiomatic and the sensual—even the vulgar—the lushly poetic with the coarsely powerful. But perhaps Shelley’s idea of appropriate language fits, after all: Beatrice Chancy is a woman of mixed blood—the child of a slave woman and her slave owner; she has been educated by her white father in a convent school. Sometimes that educated, elevated discourse is heard; at other times, she uses the variety of discourses operative within slave society—from religious to colloquial. But all the time, words count—as in all printed and oral literature. Clarke’s verse drama was given a staged reading in Toronto in 1997, but the story’s, if not the book’s, real second life came when it was used as the basis for an opera libretto. Actually the libretto commission came first (from Queen of Puddings Theatre in Toronto), and Clarke started writing what was to be his first of many opera texts. Constantly frustrated by the art form’s demands for concision, he found himself writing two texts at once—a short libretto and a longer, five-act tragic verse play to be published separately. Since it takes considerably longer to sing than to speak (or read) a line of text, the composer James Rolfe keep asking for cuts—in the name of economy (too many singers), because of clarity of action for audience comprehension, or because of sheer length. Opera audiences have to sit in a theatre for a fixed length of time, unlike readers who can put a book down and return to it later. However, what was never sacrificed to length or to the demands of the music was the language. In fact, the double impact of the powerful mixed language and the equally potent music, increases the impact of the literary text when performed in its operatic adaptation. Here is the verse play version of the scene after Beatrice’s rape by her own father, Francis Chancey: I was black but comely. Don’t glance Upon me. This flesh is crumbling Like proved lies. I’m perfumed, ruddied Carrion. Assassinated. Screams of mucking juncos scrawled Over the chapel and my nerves, A stickiness, as when he finished Maculating my thighs and dress. My eyes seep pus; I can’t walk: the floors Are tizzy, dented by stout mauling. Suddenly I would like poison. The flesh limps from my spine. My inlets crimp. Vultures flutter, ghastly, without meaning. I can see lice swarming the air. … His scythe went shick shick shick and slashed My flowers; they lay, murdered, in heaps. (90) The biblical and the violent meet in the texture of the language. And none of that power gets lost in the opera adaptation, despite cuts and alterations for easier aural comprehension. I was black but comely. Don’t look Upon me: this flesh is dying. I’m perfumed, bleeding carrion, My eyes weep pus, my womb’s sopping With tears; I can hardly walk: the floors Are tizzy, the sick walls tumbling, Crumbling like proved lies. His scythe went shick shick shick and cut My flowers; they lay in heaps, murdered. (95) Clarke has said that he feels the libretto is less “literary” in his words than the verse play, for it removes the lines of French, Latin, Spanish and Italian that pepper the play as part of the author’s critique of the highly educated planter class in Nova Scotia: their education did not guarantee ethical behaviour (“Adaptation” 14). I have not concentrated on the music of the opera, because I wanted to keep the focus on the language. But I should say that the Rolfe’s score is as historically grounded as Clarke’s libretto: it is rooted in African Canadian music (from ring shouts to spirituals to blues) and in Scottish fiddle music and local reels of the time, not to mention bel canto Italian opera. However, the music consciously links black and white traditions in a way that Clarke’s words and story refuse: they remain stubbornly separate, set in deliberate tension with the music’s resolution. Beatrice will murder her father, and, at the very moment that Nova Scotia slaves are liberated, she and her co-conspirators will be hanged for that murder. Unlike the printed verse drama, the shorter opera libretto functions like a screenplay, if you will. It is not so much an autonomous work unto itself, but it points toward a potential enactment or embodiment in performance. Yet, even there, Clarke cannot resist the lure of words—even though they are words that no audience will ever hear. The stage directions for Act 3, scene 2 of the opera read: “The garden. Slaves, sunflowers, stars, sparks” (98). The printed verse play is full of these poetic associative stage directions, suggesting that despite his protestations to the contrary, Clarke may have thought of that version as one meant to be read by the eye. After Beatrice’s rape, the stage directions read: “A violin mopes. Invisible shovelsful of dirt thud upon the scene—as if those present were being buried alive—like ourselves” (91). Our imaginations—and emotions—go to work, assisted by the poet’s associations. There are many such textual helpers—epigraphs, photographs, notes—that we do not have when we watch and listen to the opera. We do have the music, the staged drama, the colours and sounds as well as the words of the text. As Clarke puts the difference: “as a chamber opera, Beatrice Chancy has ascended to television broadcast. But as a closet drama, it play only within the reader’s head” (“Adaptation” 14). Clarke’s work of literature, his verse drama, is a “situated utterance, produced in one medium and in one historical and social context,” to use Robert Stam’s terms. In the opera version, it was transformed into another “equally situated utterance, produced in a different context and relayed through a different medium” (45-6). I want to argue that both are worthy of study and respect by wordsmiths, by people like me. I realise I’ve loaded the dice: here neither the verse play nor the libretto is primary; neither is really the “source” text, for they were written at the same time and by the same person. But for readers and audiences (my focus and interest here), they exist on a continuum—depending on which we happen to experience first. As Ilana Shiloh explores here, the same is true about the short story and film of Memento. I am not alone in wanting to mount a defence of adaptations. Julie Sanders ends her new book called Adaptation and Appropriation with these words: “Adaptation and appropriation … are, endlessly and wonderfully, about seeing things come back to us in as many forms as possible” (160). The storytelling imagination is an adaptive mechanism—whether manifesting itself in print or on stage or on screen. The study of the production of literature should, I would like to argue, include those other forms taken by that storytelling drive. If I can be forgiven a move to the amusing—but still serious—in concluding, Terry Pratchett puts it beautifully in his fantasy story, Witches Abroad: “Stories, great flapping ribbons of shaped space-time, have been blowing and uncoiling around the universe since the beginning of time. And they have evolved. The weakest have died and the strongest have survived and they have grown fat on the retelling.” In biology as in culture, adaptations reign. References Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence. New York: Oxford University Press, 1975. Bruhn, Mark J. “’Prodigious Mixtures and Confusions Strange’: The Self-Subverting Mixed Style of The Cenci.” Poetics Today 22.4 (2001). Clarke, George Elliott. “Beatrice Chancy: A Libretto in Four Acts.” Canadian Theatre Review 96 (1998): 62-79. ———. Beatrice Chancy. Victoria, BC: Polestar, 1999. ———. “Adaptation: Love or Cannibalism? Some Personal Observations”, unpublished manuscript of article. Frye, Northrop. The Educated Imagination. Toronto: CBC, 1963. Goodman, Nelson. Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968. Hutcheon, Linda, and Gary R. Bortolotti. “On the Origin of Adaptations: Rethinking Fidelity Discourse and “Success”—Biologically.” New Literary History. Forthcoming. Joyce, James. Dubliners. 1916. New York: Viking, 1967. ———. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. 1916. Penguin: Harmondsworth, 1960. Larson, Katherine. “Resistance from the Margins in George Elliott Clarke’s Beatrice Chancy.” Canadian Literature 189 (2006): 103-118. McGee, Celia. “Beowulf on Demand.” New York Times, Arts and Leisure. 30 April 2006. A4. Rushdie, Salman. The Satanic Verses. New York: Viking, 1988. ———. Haroun and the Sea of Stories. London: Granta/Penguin, 1990. Sanders, Julie. Adaptation and Appropriation. London and New York: Routledge, 160. Shelley, Percy Bysshe. The Cenci. Ed. George Edward Woodberry. Boston and London: Heath, 1909. Stam, Robert. “Introduction: The Theory and Practice of Adaptation.” Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Film Adaptation. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005. 1-52. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Hutcheon, Linda. "In Defence of Literary Adaptation as Cultural Production." M/C Journal 10.2 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/01-hutcheon.php>. APA Style Hutcheon, L. (May 2007) "In Defence of Literary Adaptation as Cultural Production," M/C Journal, 10(2). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/01-hutcheon.php>.

Anyone contemplating the role of a “hermeneutics of suspicion” in literary and cultural studies must concede that the phrase is rarely used—even by its most devout practitioners, who usually think of themselves engaged in something called “critique.” What, then, are the terminological differences between “critique” and “the hermeneutics of suspicion”? What intellectual worlds do these specific terms conjure up, and how do these worlds converge or diverge? And what is the rationale for preferring one term over the other?The “hermeneutics of suspicion” is a phrase coined by Paul Ricoeur to capture a common spirit that pervades the writings of Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche. In spite of their obvious differences, he argued, these thinkers jointly constitute a “school of suspicion.” That is to say, they share a commitment to unmasking “the lies and illusions of consciousness;” they are the architects of a distinctively modern style of interpretation that circumvents obvious or self-evident meanings in order to draw out less visible and less flattering truths (Ricoeur 356). Ricoeur’s term has sustained an energetic after-life within religious studies, as well as in philosophy, intellectual history, and related fields, yet it never really took hold in literary studies. Why has a field that has devoted so much of its intellectual energy to interrogating, subverting, and defamiliarising found so little use for Ricoeur’s phrase?In general, we can note that hermeneutics remains a path not taken in Anglo-American literary theory. The tradition of hermeneutical thinking is rarely acknowledged (how often do you see Gadamer or Ricoeur taught in a theory survey?), let alone addressed, assimilated, or argued over. Thanks to a lingering aura of teutonic stodginess, not to mention its long-standing links with a tradition of biblical interpretation, hermeneutics was never able to muster the intellectual edginess and high-wattage excitement generated by various forms of poststructuralism. Even the work of Gianni Vattimo, one of the most innovative and prolific of contemporary hermeneutical thinkers, has barely registered in the mainstream of literary and cultural studies. On occasion, to be sure, hermeneutics crops up as a synonym for a discredited model of “depth” interpretation—the dogged pursuit of a hidden true meaning—that has supposedly been superseded by more sophisticated forms of thinking. Thus the ascent of poststructuralism, it is sometimes claimed, signaled a turn away from hermeneutics to deconstruction and genealogy—leading to a focus on surface rather than depth, on structure rather than meaning, on analysis rather than interpretation. The idea of suspicion has fared little better. While Ricoeur’s account of a hermeneutics of suspicion is respectful, even admiring, critics are understandably leery of having their lines of argument reduced to their putative state of mind. The idea of a suspicious hermeneutics can look like an unwarranted personalisation of scholarly work, one that veers uncomfortably close to Harold Bloom’s tirades against the “School of Resentment” and other conservative complaints about literary studies as a hot-bed of paranoia, kill-joy puritanism, petty-minded pique, and defensive scorn. Moreover, the anti-humanist rhetoric of much literary theory—its resolute focus on transpersonal and usually linguistic structures of determination—proved inhospitable to any serious reflections on attitude, disposition, or affective stance.The concept of critique, by contrast, turns out to be marred by none of these disadvantages. An unusually powerful, flexible and charismatic idea, it has rendered itself ubiquitous and indispensable in literary and cultural studies. Critique is widely seen as synonymous with intellectual rigor, theoretical sophistication, and intransigent opposition to the status quo. Drawing a sense of intellectual weightiness from its connections to the canonical tradition of Kant and Marx, it has managed, nonetheless, to retain a cutting-edge sensibility, retooling itself to fit the needs of new fields ranging from postcolonial theory to disability studies. Critique is contagious and charismatic, drawing everything around it into its field of force, marking the boundaries of what counts as serious thought. For many scholars in the humanities, it is not just one good thing but the only conceivable thing. Who would want to be associated with the bad smell of the uncritical? There are five facets of critique (enumerated and briefly discussed below) that characterise its current role in literary and cultural studies and that have rendered critique an exceptionally successful rhetorical-cultural actor. Critique, that is to say, inspires intense attachments, serves as a mediator in numerous networks, permeates disciplines and institutional structures, spawns conferences, essays, courses, and book proposals, and triggers countless imitations, translations, reflections, revisions, and rebuttals (including the present essay). While nurturing a sense of its own marginality, iconoclasm, and outsiderdom, it is also exceptionally effective at attracting disciples, forging alliances, inspiring mimicry, and ensuring its own survival. In “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?” Bruno Latour remarks that critique has been so successful because it assures us that we are always right—unlike those naïve believers whose fetishes we strive to expose (225–48). At the same time, thanks to its self-reflexivity, the rhetoric of critique is more tormented and self-divided than such a description would suggest; it broods constantly over the shame of its own success, striving to detect signs of its own complicity and to root out all possible evidence of collusion with the status quo.Critique is negative. Critique retains the adversarial force of a suspicious hermeneutics, while purifying it of affective associations by treating negativity as an essentially philosophical or political matter. To engage in critique is to grapple with the oversights, omissions, contradictions, insufficiencies, or evasions in the object one is analysing. Robert Koch writes that “critical discourse, as critical discourse, must never formulate positive statements: it is always ‘negative’ in relation to its object” (531). Critique is characterised by its “againstness,” by its desire to take a hammer, as Latour would say, to the beliefs of others. Faith is to be countered with vigilant skepticism, illusion yields to a sobering disenchantment, the fetish must be defetishised, the dream world stripped of its befuddling powers. However, the negativity of critique is not just a matter of fault-finding, scolding, and censuring. The nay-saying critic all too easily calls to mind the Victorian patriarch, the thin-lipped schoolmarm, the glaring policeman. Negating is tangled up with a long history of legislation, prohibition and interdiction—it can come across as punitive, arrogant, authoritarian, or vitriolic. In consequence, defenders of critique often downplay its associations with outright condemnation. It is less a matter of refuting particular truths than of scrutinising the presumptions and procedures through which truths are established. A preferred idiom is that of “problematising,” of demonstrating the ungroundedness of beliefs rather than denouncing errors. The role of critique is not to castigate, but to complicate, not to engage in ideas’ destruction but to expose their cultural construction. Barbara Johnson, for example, contends that a critique of a theoretical system “is not an examination of its flaws and imperfections” (xv). Rather, “the critique reads backwards from what seems natural, obvious, self-evident, or universal in order to show that these things have their history” and to show that the “start point is not a (natural) given, but a (cultural) construct, usually blind to itself” (Johnson xv–xvi). Yet it seems a tad disingenuous to describe such critique as free of negative judgment and the examination of flaws. Isn’t an implicit criticism being transmitted in Johnson’s claim that a cultural construct is “usually blind to itself”? And the adjectival chain “natural, obvious, self-evident, or universal” strings together some of the most negatively weighted words in contemporary criticism. A posture of detachment, in other words, can readily convey a tacit or implicit judgment, especially when it is used to probe the deep-seated convictions, primordial passions, and heart-felt attachments of others. In this respect, the ongoing skirmishes between ideology critique and poststructuralist critique do not over-ride their commitment to a common ethos: a sharply honed suspicion that goes behind the backs of its interlocutors to retrieve counter-intuitive and uncomplimentary meanings. “You do not know that you are ideologically-driven, historically determined, or culturally constructed,” declares the subject of critique to the object of critique, “but I do!” As Marcelo Dascal points out, the supposedly non-evaluative stance of historical or genealogical argument nevertheless retains a negative or demystifying force in tracing ideas back to causes invisible to the actors themselves (39–62).Critique is secondary. A critique is always a critique of something, a commentary on another argument, idea, or object. Critique does not vaunt its self-sufficiency, independence, and autotelic splendor; it makes no pretense of standing alone. It could not function without something to critique, without another entity to which it reacts. Critique is symbiotic; it does its thinking by responding to the thinking of others. But while secondary, critique is far from subservient. It seeks to wrest from a text a different account than it gives of itself. In doing so, it assumes that it will meet with, and overcome, a resistance. If there were no resistance, if the truth were self-evident and available for all to see, the act of critique would be superfluous. Its goal is not the slavish reconstruction of an original or true meaning but a counter-reading that brings previously unfathomed insights to light. The secondariness of critique is not just a logical matter—critique presumes the existence of a prior object—but also a temporal one. Critique comes after another text; it follows or succeeds another piece of writing. Critique, then, looks backward and, in doing so, it presumes to understand the past better than the past understands itself. Hindsight becomes insight; from our later vantage point, we feel ourselves primed to see better, deeper, further. The belatedness of critique is transformed into a source of iconoclastic strength. Scholars of Greek tragedy or Romantic poetry may mourn their inability to inhabit a vanished world, yet this historical distance is also felt as a productive estrangement that allows critical knowledge to unfold. Whatever the limitations of our perspective, how can we not know more than those who have come before? We moderns leave behind us a trail of errors, finally corrected, like a cloud of ink from a squid, remarks Michel Serres (48). There is, in short, a quality of historical chauvinism built into critique, making it difficult to relinquish a sense of in-built advantage over those lost souls stranded in the past. Critique likes to have the last word. Critique is intellectual. Critique often insists on its difference from everyday practices of criticism and judgment. While criticism evaluates a specific object, according to one definition, “critique is concerned to identify the conditions of possibility under which a domain of objects appears” (Butler 109). Critique is interested in big pictures, cultural frameworks, underlying schema. It is a mode of thought well matched to the library and seminar room, to a rhythm of painstaking inquiry rather than short-term problem-solving. It “slows matters down, requires analysis and reflection, and often raises questions rather than providing answers” (Ruitenberg 348). Critique is thus irresistibly drawn toward self-reflexive thinking. Its domain is that of second-level observation, in which we reflect on the frames, paradigms, and perspectives that form and inform our understanding. Even if objectivity is an illusion, how can critical self-consciousness not trump the available alternatives? This questioning of common sense is also a questioning of common language: self-reflexivity is a matter of form as well as content, requiring the deployment of what Jonathan Culler and Kevin Lamb call “difficult language” that can undermine or “un-write” the discourses that make up our world (1–14). Along similar lines, Paul Bove allies himself with a “tradition that insists upon difficulty, slowness, complex, often dialectical and highly ironic styles,” as an essential antidote to the “prejudices of the current regime of truth: speed, slogans, transparency, and reproducibility” (167). Critique, in short, demands an arduous working over of language, a stoic refusal of the facile phrase and ready-made formula. Yet such programmatic divisions between critique and common sense have the effect of relegating ordinary language to a state of automatic servitude, while condescending to those unschooled in the patois of literary and critical theory. Perhaps it is time to reassess the dog-in-the-manger attitude of a certain style of academic argument—one that assigns to scholars the vantage point of the lucid and vigilant thinker, while refusing to extend this same capacity to those naïve and unreflecting souls of whom they speak.Critique comes from below. Politics and critique are often equated and conflated in literary studies and elsewhere. Critique is iconoclastic in spirit; it rails against authority; it seeks to lay bare the injustices of the law. It is, writes Foucault, the “art of voluntary insubordination, that of reflected intractability” (194). This vision of critique can be traced back to Marx and is cemented in the tradition of critical theory associated with the Frankfurt School. Critique conceives of itself as coming from below, or being situated at the margins; it is the natural ally of excluded groups and subjugated knowledges; it is not just a form of knowledge but a call to action. But who gets to claim the mantle of opposition, and on what grounds? In a well-known essay, Nancy Fraser remarks that critical theory possesses a “partisan though not uncritical identification” with oppositional social movements (97). As underscored by Fraser’s judicious insertion of the phrase “not uncritical,” critique guards its independence and reserves the right to query the actions and attitudes of the oppressed as well as the oppressors. Thus the intellectual’s affiliation with a larger community may collide with a commitment to the ethos of critique, as the object of a more heartfelt attachment. A separation occurs, as Francois Cusset puts it, “between academics questioning the very methods of questioning” and the more immediate concerns of the minority groups with which they are allied (157). One possible strategy for negotiating this tension is to flag one’s solidarity with a general principle of otherness or alterity—often identified with the utopian or disruptive energies of the literary text. This strategy gives critique a shot in the arm, infusing it with a dose of positive energy and ethical substance, yet without being pinned down to the ordinariness of a real-world referent. This deliberate vagueness permits critique to nurture its mistrust of the routines and practices through which the everyday business of the world is conducted, while remaining open to the possibility of a radically different future. Critique in its positive aspects thus remains effectively without content, gesturing toward a horizon that must remain unspecified if it is not to lapse into the same fallen state as the modes of thought that surround it (Fish 446).Critique does not tolerate rivals. Declaring itself uniquely equipped to diagnose the perils and pitfalls of representation, critique often chafes at the presence of other forms of thought. Ruling out the possibility of peaceful co-existence or even mutual indifference, it insists that those who do not embrace its tenets must be denying or disavowing them. In this manner, whatever is different from critique is turned into the photographic negative of critique—evidence of an irrefutable lack or culpable absence. To refuse to be critical is to be uncritical; a judgment whose overtones of naiveté, apathy, complacency, submissiveness, and sheer stupidity seem impossible to shrug off. In short, critique thinks of itself as exceptional. It is not one path, but the only conceivable path. Drew Milne pulls no punches in his programmatic riff on Kant: “to be postcritical is to be uncritical: the critical path alone remains open” (18).The exceptionalist aura of critique often thwarts attempts to get outside its orbit. Sociologist Michael Billig, for example, notes that critique thinks of itself as battling orthodoxy, yet is now the reigning orthodoxy—no longer oppositional, but obligatory, not defamiliarising, but oppressively familiar: “For an increasing number of younger academics,” he remarks, “the critical paradigm is the major paradigm in their academic world” (Billig 292). And in a hard-hitting argument, Talal Asad points out that critique is now a quasi-automatic stance for Western intellectuals, promoting a smugness of tone that can be cruelly dismissive of the deeply felt beliefs and attachments of others. Yet both scholars conclude their arguments by calling for a critique of critique, reinstating the very concept they have so meticulously dismantled. Critique, it seems, is not to be abandoned but intensified; critique is to be replaced by critique squared. The problem with critique, it turns out, is that it is not yet critical enough. The objections to critique are still very much part and parcel of the critique-world; the value of the critical is questioned only to be emphatically reinstated.Why do these protestations against critique end up worshipping at the altar of critique? Why does it seem so exceptionally difficult to conceive of other ways of arguing, reading, and thinking? We may be reminded of Eve Sedgwick’s comments on the mimetic aspect of critical interpretation: its remarkable ability to encourage imitation, repetition, and mimicry, thereby ensuring its own reproduction. It is an efficiently running form of intellectual machinery, modeling a style of thought that is immediately recognisable, widely applicable, and easily teachable. Casting the work of the scholar as a never-ending labour of distancing, deflating, and diagnosing, it rules out the possibility of a different relationship to one’s object. It seems to grow, as Sedgwick puts it, “like a crystal in a hypersaturated solution, blotting out any sense of the possibility of alternative ways of understanding or things to understand” (131).In this context, a change in vocabulary—a redescription, if you will—may turn out to be therapeutic. It will come as no great surprise if I urge a second look at the hermeneutics of suspicion. Ricoeur’s phrase, I suggest, can help guide us through the interpretative tangle of contemporary literary studies. It seizes on two crucial parts of critical argument—its sensibility and its interpretative method—that deserve more careful scrutiny. At the same time, it offers a much-needed antidote to the charisma of critique: the aura of ethical and political exemplarity that burnishes its negativity with a normative glow. Thanks to this halo effect, I’ve suggested, we are encouraged to assume that the only alternative to critique is a full-scale surrender to complacency, quietism, and—in literary studies—the intellectual fluff of aesthetic appreciation. Critique, moreover, presents itself as an essentially disembodied intellectual exercise, an austere, even abstemious practice of unsettling, unmaking, and undermining. Yet contemporary styles of critical argument are affective as well as analytical, conjuring up distinctive dispositions and relations to their object. As Amanda Anderson has pointed out in The Way We Argue Now, literary and cultural theory is saturated with what rhetoricians call ethos—that is to say, imputations of motive, character, or attitude. We need only think of the insouciance associated with Rortyan pragmatism, the bad-boy iconoclasm embraced by some queer theorists, or the fastidious aestheticism that characterises a certain kind of deconstructive reading. Critical languages, in other words, are also orientations, encouraging readers to adopt an affectively tinged stance toward their object. Acknowledging the role of such orientations in critical debate does not invalidate its intellectual components, nor does it presume to peer into, or diagnose, an individual scholar’s state of mind.In a related essay, I scrutinise some of the qualities of a suspicious or critical reading practice: distance rather than closeness; guardedness rather than openness; aggression rather than submission; superiority rather than reverence; attentiveness rather than distraction; exposure rather than tact (215–34). Suspicion, in this sense, constitutes a muted affective state—a curiously non-emotional emotion of morally inflected mistrust—that overlaps with, and builds upon, the stance of detachment that characterises the stance of the professional or expert. That this style of reading proves so alluring has much to do with the gratifications and satisfactions that it offers. Beyond the usual political or philosophical justifications of critique, it also promises the engrossing pleasure of a game-like sparring with the text in which critics deploy inventive skills and innovative strategies to test their wits, best their opponents, and become sharper, shrewder, and more sophisticated players. In this context, the claim that contemporary criticism has moved “beyond” hermeneutics should be treated with a grain of salt, given that, as Stanley Fish points out, “interpretation is the only game in town” (446). To be sure, some critics have backed away from the model of what they call “depth interpretation” associated with Marx and Freud, in which reading is conceived as an act of digging and the critic, like a valiant archaeologist, excavates a resistant terrain in order to retrieve the treasure of hidden meaning. In this model, the text is envisaged as possessing qualities of interiority, concealment, penetrability, and depth; it is an object to be plundered, a puzzle to be solved, a secret message to be deciphered. Instead, poststructuralist critics are drawn to the language of defamiliarising rather than discovery. The text is no longer composed of strata and the critic does not burrow down but stands back. Instead of brushing past surface meanings in pursuit of hidden truth, she dwells in ironic wonder on these surface meanings, seeking to “denaturalise” them through the mercilessness of her gaze. Insight, we might say, is achieved by distancing rather than by digging. Recent surveys of criticism often highlight the rift between these camps, underscoring the differences between the diligent seeker after buried truth and the surface-dwelling ironist. From a Ricoeur-inflected point of view, however, it is their shared investment in a particular ethos—a stance of knowingness, guardedness, suspicion and vigilance—that turns out to be more salient and more striking. Moreover, these approaches are variously engaged in the dance of interpretation, seeking to go beyond the backs of texts or fellow-actors in order to articulate non-obvious and often counter-intuitive truths. In the case of poststructuralism, we can speak of a second-order hermeneutics that is less interested in probing the individual object than the larger frameworks and conditions in which it is embedded. What the critic interprets is no longer a self-contained poem or novel, but a broader logic of discursive structures, reading formations, or power relations. Ricoeur’s phrase, moreover, has the singular advantage of allowing us to by-pass the exceptionalist tendencies of critique: its presumption that whatever is not critique can only be assigned to the ignominious state of the uncritical. As a less prejudicial term, it opens up a larger history of suspicious reading, including traditions of religious questioning and self-scrutiny that bear on current forms of interpretation, but that are occluded by the aggressively secular connotations of critique (Hunter). In this context, Ricoeur’s own account needs to be supplemented and modified to acknowledge this larger cultural history; the hermeneutics of suspicion is not just the brain-child of a few exceptional thinkers, as his argument implies, but a widespread practice of interpretation embedded in more mundane, diffuse and variegated forms of life (Felski 220).Finally, the idea of a suspicious hermeneutics does not invalidate or rule out other interpretative possibilities—ranging from Ricoeur’s own notion of a hermeneutics of trust to more recent coinages such as Sedgwick’s “restorative reading,” Sharon Marcus’s “just reading” or Timothy Bewes’s “generous reading.” Literary studies in France, for example, is currently experiencing a new surge of interest in hermeneutics (redefined as a practice of reinvention rather than exhumation) as well as a reinvigorated phenomenology of reading that elucidates, in rich and fascinating detail, its immersive and affective dimensions (see Citton; Macé). This growing interest in the ethos, aesthetics, and ethics of reading is long overdue. Such an orientation by no means rules out attention to the sociopolitical resonances of texts and their interpretations. It is, however, no longer willing to subordinate such attention to the seductive but sterile dichotomy of the critical versus the uncritical.ReferencesAnderson, Amanda. The Way We Argue Now: A Study in the Cultures of Theory. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2005.Asad, Talal. “Free Speech, Blasphemy, and Secular Criticism.” Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech. Ed. Talal Asad, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, and Saba Mahmood. Berkeley: Townsend Center for the Humanities, 2009. 20–63. Bewes, Timothy. “Reading with the Grain: A New World in Literary Studies.” Differences 21.3 (2010): 1–33.Billig, Michael. “Towards a Critique of the Critical.” Discourse and Society 11.3 (2000): 291–92. Bloom, Harold. The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994.Bove, Paul. Mastering Discourse: The Politics of Intellectual Culture. Durham: Duke UP, 1992. Butler, Judith. “The Sensibility of Critique: Response to Asad and Mahmood.” Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech. Ed. Talal Asad, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, and Saba Mahmood. Berkeley: Townsend Center for the Humanities, 2009. 101–136.Citton, Yves. Lire, interpréter, actualiser: pourqoi les études littéraires? Paris: Editions Amsterdam, 2007. Culler, Jonathan and Kevin Lamb, “Introduction.” Just Being Difficult? Academic Writing in the Public Arena. Ed. Jonathan Culler and Kevin Lamb. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003. 1–14. Cusset, Francois. French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States. Trans. Jeff Fort. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2008.Dascal, Marcelo. “Critique without Critics?” Science in Context 10.1 (1997): 39–62.Felski, Rita. “Suspicious Minds.” Poetics Today 32.2 (2011): 215–34.Fish, Stanley. Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies. Durham: Duke UP, 1989.Foucault, Michel. “What is Critique?” The Political. Ed. David Ingram. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002. 191–211. Fraser, Nancy. “What’s Critical about Critical Theory? The Case of Habermas and Gender.” New German Critique 35 (1985): 97–131. Hunter, Ian. Rethinking the School: Subjectivity, Bureaucracy, Criticism. New York: St Martin’s Press, 1994.Johnson, Barbara. “Translator’s Introduction.” Jacques Derrida’s Dissemination. London: Continuum, 2004. vii–xxxv. Koch, Robert. “The Critical Gesture in Philosophy.” Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion, and Art. Ed. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel. Cambridge: MIT, 2002. 524–36. Latour, Bruno. “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern.” Critical Inquiry 30 (2004): 225–48.Macé, Marielle. Facons de lire, manières d’être. Paris: Gallimard, 2011. Marcus, Sharon. Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2007.Milne, Drew. “Introduction: Criticism and/or Critique.” Modern Critical Thought: An Anthology of Theorists Writing on Theorists. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002. 1–22. Ricoeur, Paul. Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. New Haven: Yale UP, 1970. Ruitenberg, Claudia. “Don’t Fence Me In: The Liberation of Undomesticated Critique.” Journal of the Philosophy of Education 38.3 (2004): 314–50. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, Or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay is About You.” Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham: Duke UP, 2003. 123–52. Serres, Michel and Bruno Latour. Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time. Trans. Roxanne Lapidus. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1995.Vattimo, Gianni. Beyond Interpretation: The Meaning of Hermeneutics for Philosophy. Trans. David Webb. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1997.

Introduction Jerusalema, a song from Mzansi — an informal isiZulu name for South Africa — became a global hit during the Covid-19 pandemic. Set to a repetitive, slow four-to-a-bar beat characteristic of South African house music, the gospel-influenced song was released through Open Mic Productions in 2019 by the DJ and record producer Kgaogelo Moagi, popularly known as ‘Master KG’. The production resulted from a collaboration between Master KG, the music producer Charmza The DJ, who composed the music, and the vocalist Nomcebo Zikode, who wrote the lyrics and performed the song for the master recording. Jerusalema immediately trended on social media and, as a “soundtrack of the pandemic” (Modise), became one of the most popular songs of 2020. Soon, it reached no. 1 on the music charts in Belgium, Romania, the Netherlands, South Africa, and Switzerland, while going triple platinum in Italy and double platinum in Spain (Hissong). By September 2020, Jerusalema was the most Shazammed song in history. To date, it has generated more than half a billion views on YouTube. After its initial success as a music video, the song’s influence was catapulted to a global cultural phenomenon by the #JerusalemaDanceChallenge video posted by the Angolan dance troupe Fenómenos do Semba in 2020, featuring exquisite dance steps that inspired a viral social media challenge. Some observed that footwork in several of the videos posted, suggested dance types associated with pantsula jive and kwaito music, both of which originated from the black townships of South Africa during the apartheid era. Yet, the leader of the Angolan dance troupe Fenómenos do Semba, Adilson Maiza claimed that the group’s choreography mixed kuduro dance steps (derived from the Angolan Portuguese term “cu duro” or “hard ass”) and Afro-beat. According to Master KG, indeed, the choreography made famous by the Angolan dancers conveyed an Angolan touch, described by Maiza as signature ginga e banga Angolana (Angolan sway and swag; Kabir). As a “counter-contagion” in the age of Coronavirus (Kabir), groups of individuals, ranging from school learners and teachers, police officers, and nursing staff in Africa to priests and nuns in Europe and Palestinians in the Old City of Jerusalem were posting Jerusalema dance videos. Famous efforts came from Vietnam, Switzerland, Ireland, Austria, and Morocco. Numerous videos of healthcare workers became a source of hope for patients with COVID-19 (Chingono). Following the thought of Zygmunt Bauman, in this article I interpret Jerusalema as a “re-enchantment” of a disenchanted world. Focussing on the song’s “magic”, I interrogate why this music video could take on such special meaning for millions of individuals and inspire a viral dance craze. My understanding of “magic” draws on the writings of Patrick Curry, who, in turn, bases his definition of the term on the thought of J.R.R. Tolkien. Curry (5) cites Tolkien in differentiating between two ways in which the word “magic” is generally used: “one to mean enchantment, as in: ‘It was magic!’ and the other to denote a paranormal means to an end, as in: ‘to use magic’”. The argument in this article draws on the first of these explications. As a global media sensation, Jerusalema placed a spotlight on the paucity of a “de-spiritualized, de-animated world,” a world “waging war against mystery and magic” (Baumann x-xi). However, contexts of production and reception, as outlined in Burns and Hawkins (2ff.), warrant consideration of social and cultural values and ideologies masked by the music video’s idealised representation of everyday South African life and its glamourised expression of faith. Thus, while referring to the millennia-old Jerusalem trope and its ensuing mythologies via an intertextual reading, I shall also consider the song alongside the South African-produced epic gangster action film Jerusalema (2008; Orange) while furthermore reflecting on the contexts of its production. Why Jerusalema — Why Its “Magic”? The global fame attained by Master KG’s Jerusalema brought to the fore questions of what made the song and its ensuing dance challenge so exceptional and what lay behind its “magic” (Ndzuta). The song’s simple yet deeply spiritual words appeal to God to take the singer to the heavenly city. In an abbreviated form, as translated from the original isiZulu, the words mean, “Jerusalem is my home, guard me, walk with me, do not leave me here — Jerusalem is my home, my place is not here, my kingdom is not here” (“Jerusalema Lyrics in English”). These words speak of the yearning for salvation, home, and togetherness, with Jerusalem as its spiritual embodiment. As Ndzuta notes, few South African songs have achieved the kind of global status attained by “Jerusalema”. A prominent earlier example is Miriam Makeba’s dance hit Pata Pata, released in the 1960s during the apartheid era. The song’s global impact was enabled by Makeba’s fame and talent as a singer and her political activism against the apartheid regime (Ndzuta). Similarly, the South African hits included on Paul Simon’s Graceland album (1986) — like Ladysmith Black Mambazo’s Homeless — emanated from a specific politico-historical moment that, despite critique against Simon for violating the cultural boycott against South Africa at the time, facilitated their international impact and dissemination (Denselow). Jerusalema’s fame was not tied to political activism but derived from the turbulent times of the COVID-19 pandemic, which, according to statistics published by the World Health Organization, by the end of 2020 had claimed more than 3 million lives globally (“True Death Toll of Covid-19”). Within this context, the song’s message of divine guidance and the protection of a spiritual home was particularly relevant as it lifted global spirits darkened by the pandemic and the many losses it incurred. Likewise, the #JerusalemaDanceChallenge brought joy and feelings of togetherness during these challenging times, as was evidenced by the countless videos posted online. The Magic of the Myth Central to the lyrics of Jerusalema is the city of Jerusalem, which has, as Hees (95) notes, for millennia been “an intense marker of personal, social and religious identity and aspirations in words and music”. Nevertheless, Master KG’s Jerusalema differs from other “Jerusalem songs” in that it encompasses dense layering of “enchantment”. In contrast to Ladysmith Black Mambazo’s Awu Jerusalema, for instance, with its solemn, hymn-like structure and close harmonic vocal delivery, Master KG’s Jerusalema features Nomcebo’s sensuous and versatile voice in a gripping version of the South African house/gospel style known affectionately as the “Amapiano sound” — a raw hybrid of deep house, jazz and lounge music characterised by the use of synthesizers and wide percussive basslines (Seroto). In the original music video, in combination with Nomcebo’s soulful rendition, visuals featuring everyday scenes from South African township life take on alluring, if not poetic dimensions — a magical sensory mix, to which an almost imperceptible slow-motion camera effect adds the impression of “time slowing down”, simultaneously “softening” images of poverty and decay. Fig. 1: “Enchantment” and the joy of the dance. Still from the video “Jerusalema”. From a philosophical perspective, Zygmunt Bauman (xi) contends that “it is against a dis-enchanted world that the postmodern re-enchantment is aimed”. Yet, in a more critical vein, he also argues that, within the postmodern condition, humanity has been left alone with its fears and with an existential void that is “here to stay”: “postmodernity has not allayed the fears that modernity injected into humanity; postmodernity only privatized these fears”. For this reason, Bauman believes, postmodernity “had to become an age of imagined communities” (xviii-xxix). Furthermore, he deems that it is because of its extreme vulnerability that community provides the focus of postmodern concerns in attracting so much intellectual and “real-world” attention (Bauman xxix). Most notably, and relevant to the phenomenon of the media craze, as discussed in this article, Bauman defines the imagined community by way of the cogito “I am seen, therefore I exist” (xix). Not only does Bauman’s line of thought explain the mass and media appeal of populist ideologies of postmodernity that strive to “fill the void”, like Sharon Blackie’s The Enchanted Life — Unlocking the Magic of the Everyday, or Mattie James’s acclaimed Everyday Magic: The Joy of Not Being Everything and Still Being More than Enough; it also illuminates the immense collective appeal of the #JerusalemaDanceChallenge. Here, Bauman’s thought on the power of shared experience — in this case, mass-mediated experience — is, again, of particular relevance: “having no other … anchors except the affections of their ‘members’, imagined communities exist solely through … occasional outbursts of togetherness” (xix). Among these, he lists “demonstrations, marches, festivals, riots” (xix). Indeed, the joyous shared expression of the #JerusalemaDanceChallenge videos posted online during the COVID-19 pandemic may well sort under similar festive public “outbursts”. As a ceremonial dance that tells the story of shared experiences and longings, Jerusalema may be seen as one such collective celebration. True to African dance tradition, more than being merely entertainment for the masses, each in its own way, the dance videos recount history, convey emotion, celebrate rites of passage, and help unify communities in one of the darkest periods of the recent global past. An Intertextual Context for Reading “Jerusalema” However, historical dimensions of the “Jerusalem trope” suggest that Jerusalema might also be understood from a more critical perspective. As Hees (92) notes, the trope of the loss of and longing for the city of Jerusalem represents a merging of mythologies through the ages, embodied in Hebrew, Roman, Christian, Muslim, and Zionist religious cultures. Still, many Jerusalem narratives refrain from referring to its historical legacy, which fuelled hostility between the West and the Muslim world still prevalent today. Thus, the historical realities of fraud, deceit, greed, betrayal, massacres, and even cannibalism are often shunned so that Jerusalem — one of the holiest yet most blood-soaked cities in the world (Hees 92, 95) — is elevated as a symbol of the Heavenly City. In this respect, the South African crime epic Gangster Paradise: Jerusalema, which premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2008 and was later submitted to the Academy Awards for consideration to qualify as a nominee for Best Foreign Language Film (De Jager), stands in stark contrast to the divine connotations of Master KG’s Jerusalema. According to its director Ralph Ziman (Stecker), the film, inspired by a true story, offers a raw look into post-apartheid crime and corruption in the South African city of Johannesburg (De Villiers 8). Its storyline provides a sharp critique of the economic inequalities that torment South Africa in post-apartheid democracy, capturing the dissatisfaction and the “wave of violent crimes that resulted from the economic realities at its root” (Azuawusiefe 102). The irony of the narrative resides in the fact that the main protagonist, Lucky Kunene, at first reluctant to resort to a life of crime, turns to car hijacking and then to hijacking derelict, over-crowded buildings in the inner-city centre of Hillbrow (Hees 90). Having become a wealthy crime boss, Johannesburg, for him, becomes symbolic of a New Jerusalem (“Jerusalem Entjha”; Azuawusiefe 103; Hees 91-92). Entangled in the criminal underbelly of the city and arrested for murder, Kunene escapes from prison, relocating to the coastal city of Durban where, again, he envisages “Jerusalem Enthjha” (which, supposedly, once more implies a life of crime). As a portrayal of inner-city life in Johannesburg, this narrative takes on particular relevance for the current state of affairs in the country. In September this year, an uncontainable fire at a derelict, overcrowded hijacked building owned by Johannesburg municipal authorities claimed the lives of 73 people — a tragic event reported on by all major TV networks worldwide. While the events and economic actualities pictured in the film thus offer a realistic view of the adversities of current South African life, visual content in Master KG’s Jerusalema sublimates everyday South African scenes. Though the deprivation, decay, and poverty among which the majority of South Africans live is acknowledged in the video, its message of a yearning for salvation and a “better home” is foregrounded while explicit critique is shunned. This means that Jerusalema’s plea for divine deliverance is marked by an ambivalence that may weaken an understanding of the video as “pure magic”. Fig. 2: Still from the video Jerusalema showing decrepit living conditions in the background. “Jerusalema” as Layers of Meaning From Bauman’s perspective, Jerusalema — both as a music video and the #JerusalemaDanceChallenge — may represent a more profound human longing for imagined communal celebration beyond mass-mediated entertainment. From such a viewpoint, it may be seen as one specific representation of the millennia-old trope of a heavenly, transcendent Jerusalem in the biblical tradition, the celestial city providing a dwelling for the divine to enter this world (Thompson 647). Nevertheless, in Patrick Curry’s terms, as a media frenzy, the song and its ensuing dance challenge may also be understood as “enchantment enslaved by magic”; that is, enchantment in the service of mass-mediated glamour (7). This implies that Jerusalema is not exempt from underlying ideologised conditions of production, or an endorsement of materialistic values. The video exhibits many of the characteristics of a prototypical music video that guarantee commercial success — a memorable song, the incorporation of noteworthy dance routines, the showcasing of a celebrated artist, striking relations between music and image, and flashy visuals, all of which are skilfully put together (compare Korsgaard). Auslander observes, for instance, that in current music video production the appearance and behaviour of artists are the basic units of communication from which genre-specific personae are constructed (100). In this regard, the setting of a video is crucial for ensuring coherence with the constructed persona (Vernallis 87). These aspects come to the fore in Master KG’s video rendition of Jerusalema. The vocalist Nomcebo Zikode is showcased in settings that serve as a favourable backdrop to the spiritual appeal of the lyrics, either by way of slightly filtered scenes of nature or scenes of worshippers or seekers of spiritual blessing. In addition, following the gospel genre type, her gestures often suggest divine adoration. Fig. 3: Vocalist Nomcebo Zikode in a still from the video Jerusalema. However, again some ambiguity of meaning may be noted. First, the fashionable outfits featured by the singer are in stark contrast with scenes of poverty and deprivation later in the video. The impression of affluence is strengthened by her stylish make-up and haircut and the fact that she changes into different outfits during the song. This points to a glamorisation of religious worship and an idealisation of township life that disregards South Africa’s dire economic situation, which existed even before COVID-19, due to massive corruption and state capture in which the African National Congress is fully implicated (Momoniat). Furthermore, according to media reportage, Jerusalema’s context of production was not without controversy. Though the video worked its magic in the hearts of millions of viewers and listeners worldwide, the song’s celebration as a global hit was marred by legal battles over copyright and remuneration issues. First, it came to light that singer-songwriter Nomcebo Zikode had for a considerable period not been paid for her contribution to the production following Jerusalema’s commercial release in 2019 (Modise). Therefore, she resorted to a legal dispute. Also, it was alleged that Master KG was not the original owner of the music and was not even present when the song was created. Thus, the South African artists Charmza The DJ (Presley Ledwaba) and Biblos (Ntimela Chauke), who claimed to be the original creators of the track, also instituted legal action against Kgaogelo Moagi, his record label Open Mic Productions, and distributor Africori SA whose majority shareholder is the Warner Music Group (Madibogo). The Magic of the Dance Despite these moral and material ambiguities, Jerusalema’s influence as a global cultural phenomenon during the era of COVID spoke to a more profound yearning for the human condition, one that was not necessarily based on religious conviction (Shoki). Perhaps this was vested foremost in the simplicity and authenticity that transpired from the original dance challenge video and its countless pursuals posted online at the time. These prohibit reading the Jerusalema phenomenon as pseudo-enchantment driven only by a profit motive. As a wholly unforeseen, unifying force of hope and joy, the dance challenge sparked a global trend that fostered optimism among millions. Fig. 4: The Angolan dance troupe Fenómenos do Semba. (Still from the original #JerusalemaDanceChallenge video.) As stated earlier, Jerusalema did not originate from political activism. Yet, Professor of English literature Ananya Kabir uncovers a layer of meaning associated with the dance challenge, which she calls “alegropolitics” or a “politics of joy” — the joy of the dance ­­— that she links on the one hand with the Jerusalem trope and its history of trauma and dehumanisation, and, on the other, with Afro-Atlantic expressive culture as associated with enslavement, colonialism, and commodification. In her reading of the countless videos posted, their “gift to the world” is “the secret of moving collectively”. By way of individual responses to “poly-rhythmic Africanist aesthetic principles … held together by a master-structure”, Kabir interprets this communal dance as “resistance, incorporating kinetic and rhythmic principles that circulated initially around the Atlantic rim (including the Americas, Europe, the Caribbean, and Africa)”. For her, the #JerusalemaDanceChallenge is “an example of how dance enables convivencia (living together)”; “it is a line dance (animation in French, animação in Portuguese, animación in Spanish) that enlivens parties through simple choreography that makes people dance together”. In this sense, the routine’s syncopated steps allow more and more people to join as each repetition unfolds — indeed, a celebratory example of Bauman’s imagined community that exists through an “outburst of togetherness” (xix). Such a collective “fest” demonstrates how, in dance leader Maiza’s words, “it is possible to be happy with little: we party with very little” (Kabir). Accordingly, as part of a globally mediated community, with just the resources of the body (Kabir), the locked-down world partied, too, for the duration of the magical song. Whether seen as a representation of the millennia-old trope of a heavenly, transcendent Jerusalem, or, in Curry’s understanding, as enchantment in the service of mass-mediated glamour, Jerusalema and its ensuing dance challenge form an undeniable part of recent global history involving the COVID-19 pandemic. As a media frenzy, it contributed to the existing body of “Jerusalem songs”, and lifted global spirits clouded by the pandemic and its emotional and material losses. Likewise, the #JerusalemaDanceChallenge was symbolic of an imagined global community engaging in “the joy of the dance” during one of the most challenging periods in humanity’s recent past. References Auslander, Philip. “Framing Personae in Music Videos.” The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Video Analysis. Eds. Loria A. Burns and Stan Hawkins. London: Bloomsbury, 2019. 92-109. 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