Search Results (266)

It is easy to underestimate Ruth. The story is short and sweet, in elementary Hebrew, about a loyal and obedient daughter-in-law, or so we have been led to believe. The book and its eponymous character are surprisingly complex. Although Ruth is an exemplar of Hebrew narrative, it contains two poetic insertions in the first chapter. Literal translations lose the poetry, and poetic translations are less faithful to the original language. Ruth has been chosen for road-testing a range of hermeneutical approaches, and here is one more. This paper approaches these poetic insertions and, indeed, the book of Ruth, as poetry and explores a new method for examining and interpreting Hebrew poetic texts, namely, exegetical poetry. I pay particular attention to poetic devices—parsing for parallelism, alliteration, and other poetic elements—and explore their significance. As I translate and exegete, I compose poetry reflecting the form, content, and theological themes of the Hebrew poetry through the use of similar English devices, imagery, and mood. The result is an amalgam of showing through exegetical poetry and telling through prose commentary, enriching our understanding of the characterization of Ruth and Naomi, and the relationship between these poetic insertions and the broader narrative. Full article

Paul Celan’s ‘Speeches’ determine what poetry is and why we need it. He does not want ‘timeless’ poetry but still ‘lays claim to infinity’; he would ‘reach through time’. He neither refuses poetry as contrary to reason, nor elevates it as pure immediacy of meaning. He questions the ambivalent attitudes towards art—as ‘artifice’ or as ‘profound’. Celan cuts into the loose fabric of such ordinary language to shape it. Those who trumpet ‘plain sense’ against such incisive art deface it as degenerate. Celan’s poetic language presents us as ‘of the earth’ and as ‘released from it’—Büchner’s Lenz seeks clarity in the silence of alpine light but falls into madness in his isolation. He is drawn towards the life of the villagers at the foot of the mountains. He perceives the warm household fires, but it is an illusion that he can be a part of that scene. Thus, Celan enquires into art’s intensity. It is at the risk of reciprocity that a reader entertains the language of a poem. Eliot’s old ‘shadow’ between ‘the idea and the reality’ now falls between the poet’s production and the reader’s reciprocation. The reader may need someone with a free hand to hold a lantern to the script. Full article

It is widely accepted that languages organize speech material into prosodic domains, which are hierarchically arranged. However, it is still a matter of debate whether this prosodic hierarchy is composed of a small number of universal categories, or whether these prosodic categories are language-particular and emergent. In this article, we concentrate on one of these categories, the foot, and we investigate its role in European Portuguese (EP). Whereas research on EP has shown that other prosodic domains commonly found crosslinguistically are active in the language, it seems that EP may lack this prosodic constituent. Therefore, the goal of this article is to systematically investigate the role of the foot in a number of areas within EP grammar. In our study, we defend some new approaches to several long-standing issues in EP phonology and we conclude that many facts of the language can be, in fact, better understood resorting to the foot domain. Namely, the distribution of stress in the most frequent morphological classes (thematic non-verbs and present tense verbs), -inh-/-zinh- diminutive formation, the domain for regular vowel reduction, obligatory glide formation, the stress window, and poetic rhyme seem to benefit from a metrically-governed account. By contrast, other facts, such as vowel lowering, word clipping, minimal words, secondary stress, and schwa deletion are shown not to be conditioned by the foot in EP. Importantly, the evidence we found for metrical structure only cues the prominent foot of the word, suggesting that pretonic material may not be footed. All in all, in addition to shedding light on facts previously poorly understood, and exposing some noteworthy specificities of EP in the realm of Romance languages and other varieties of Portuguese, we draw implications for the universal characterization of the prosodic hierarchy and its acquisition. Full article

John Henry Newman defined the university as “a place of teaching universal knowledge”, which suggests that it is also an environment for the teaching and creation of knowledge, and therefore a medium for the teaching and creation of knowledge. Based on the field of media ecology, defined by Neil Postman as “the study of media as environments”, and following Marshall McLuhan’s famous maxim that, “the medium is the message”, we can understand knowledge to be the product of a particular type of medium or environment. Taking inspiration from the poetic questions posed by T.S. Eliot, “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?”, this essay takes issue with the view expressed among internet boosters that information is the basis of knowledge, and knowledge is the basis of wisdom. Instead, an alternative understanding presented in which information as a contemporary phenomenon is a product of the electronic media environment, knowledge is a product of the literacy associated with the chirographic and typographic media environments, and wisdom is a product of the oral media environment. Full article

God the Father was considered so completely inexpressible and unembodied that his visual appearance in early modern masterpieces has long challenged the theological accuracy of such works. A recent discovery complicates that issue. Albrecht Dürer’s 1500 Self-portrait as Christ is incorrectly considered an isolated example of divine self-representation. It was, in fact, as shown here, part of a long tradition throughout Europe between at least the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. The praxis, potentially sacrilegious, raises questions about the truth of art at its highest level. To address this conundrum, this article analyzes works by three eminent, but very different, artists: Michelangelo, Raphael, and Dürer. Two current methodologies—visual exegesis and the poetics of making—support the argument. The analysis reveals that there is a fundamental unity to their work, which has not been recognized on account of three popular misconceptions about the nature of art, divinity, and the mind. This article concludes that depictions of God the Father and Christ by these artists are neither heretical nor false because, as the evidence shows, all three were part of a continuous spiritual tradition embedded within their craft. Full article

Anyone specialising in Islamic theology at a Western university is aware of the fact that their teaching and research will either be recognised by the institution as falling under the category of “Islamic Studies” or “Divinity”. In the first case, Islam is predominantly considered a cultural phenomenon and studied as such. In the second case, for reasons that have to do with what Marianne Moyaert in her latest book Christian Imaginations of the Religious Other has conceptualised as “Christian normativity” and the “religionisation” of other faiths, Islamic theology is de facto understood as Islamic speculative theology (kalām). In both cases, the understanding of how Islam theorises and practices theology is significantly restricted, when not altogether ignored. This article unpacks the genealogy of the secular version of a Christian epistemic framework that dominates the study of Islamic theology in the West and engages with the issues related to its application in the field of Islamic theology. In doing so, it opens a critical space for the investigation of Islamic literary productions as both dissensual and consensual theological terrains, through the analysis of the poetry of two theologians and polymathic scholars from two different periods of Islamic history, namely Ibn al-Fāriḍ (d. 632/1235) and Sidi Muḥammad Ibn al-Ḥabīb (d. 1390/1971). Full article

Poetry and philosophy have had a close but uneasy relationship in the western tradition. Both share an eschewal of the discovery of novel facts, but are somewhat opposed in that discovery is a central aim of poetry, but not at all the aim of philosophy. Through a close reading of W.H. Auden’s ‘In Memory of W.B. Yeats’ and a versification of part of G.E. Moore’s ‘A Defence of Common Sense’, I argue that what poetry shows corresponds, in a broadly symbolist sense, to Wittgenstein’s understanding of the miraculous nature of the world. In this regard, poetry can offer philosophy clarity, in the form of its tonal architecture, value, and ethics, and may also constitute a perspicuous representation. Poetry remains in a perpetual mode of potential, as well as being possessed of a vatic autonomy. Full article

This paper assesses the relationship between the so-called “curses” on the Woman in Gen 3:16 in terms of themes (garden, tree, creation, marriage, procreation, and so on) and concludes that the late poetic text of the Song aims at a deliberate corrective to the negative view of gender relations in Genesis. The use of mashal, “to rule over” in Gen 3 is reassessed from the perspective of its use of the native genre designation of mashal in Wisdom Literature. There, it refers to similarities between two compared items. The direct reversal of God’s speech to the humans in Gen 3, where the woman will be ruled over by her man but still desire him, appears in the Song in the speeches of the Beloved: there she states categorically that the man is her beloved and belongs to her, while she belongs to him. The tactic of defamiliarization (a Russian literary concept) is used to juxtapose radically different views and destabilizes the notion of only one meaning for the words under consideration. In effect, reading two opposing themes together forges a new, more inclusive understanding of both. This paper concludes with a dramatic new rendering of the Song, “The Song I Sing Complete” with speech and motifs reassigned to the woman’s voice, foregrounding her remarks within the genre of love poetry, drawing on tropes found in lyrical poetry and the myth of Israel’s neighbors in Mesopotamia and Egypt. Full article

The authenticity of classical Arabic poetry has long been challenged by claims that some part of the pre-Islamic poetic heritage should not be attributed to this era. According to these assertions, some of this legacy was produced after the advent of Islam and ascribed, for different reasons, to pre-Islamic poets. As pre-Islamic poets were illiterate, medieval Arabic literature devotees relied on Bedouin oral transmission when writing down and collecting the poems about two centuries later. This process left the identity of the real poets who composed these poems and the period in which they worked unresolved. In this work, we seek to answer the questions of how and to what extent we can identify the period in which classical Arabic poetry was composed, where we exploit modern-day automatic text processing techniques for this aim. We consider a dataset of Arabic poetry collected from the diwans (‘collections of poems’) of thirteen Arabic poets that corresponds to two main eras: the pre-ʿAbbāsid era (covering the period between the 6th and the 8th centuries CE) and the ʿAbbāsid era (starting in the year 750 CE). Some poems in each diwan are considered ‘original’; i.e., poems that are attributed to a certain poet with high confidence. The diwans also include, however, an additional section of poems that are attributed to a poet with reservations, meaning that these poems might have been composed by another poet and/or in another period. We trained a set of machine learning algorithms (classifiers) in order to explore the potential of machine learning techniques to automatically identify the period in which a poem had been written. In the training phase, we represent each poem using various types of features (characteristics) designed to capture lexical, topical, and stylistic aspects of this poetry. By training and assessing automatic models of period prediction using the ‘original’ poetry, we obtained highly encouraging results, measuring between 0.73–0.90 in terms of F1 for the various periods. Moreover, we observe that the stylistic features, which pertain to elements that characterize Arabic poetry, as well as the other feature types, are all indicative of the period in which the poem had been written. We applied the resulting prediction models to poems for which the authorship period is under dispute (‘attributed’) and got interesting results, suggesting that some of the poems may belong to different eras—an issue to be further examined by Arabic poetry researchers. The resulting prediction models may be applied to poems for which the authorship period is under dispute. We demonstrate this research direction, presenting some interesting anecdotal results. Full article

Speaking is a highly conventional enterprise. But unusual usages are, nonetheless, frequently encountered. Some of these novelties fall flat, while others find favour, to the extent of entering common usage. He considered to say something will sound wrong to most native speakers, while The military disappeared her husband, which was more or less unsayable prior to the 1960s, has come to seem fine. Linguist Adelle E. Goldberg has recently argued that speakers display a remarkable openness to new words, phrases and even grammatical forms, when there is no current way of communicating whatever it is those novel strings serve to express. My paper exegetes Goldberg’s findings to illuminate the question of poetic judgement. It proposes that there is a strong parallel between how people judge linguistic innovation in everyday speaking, and the way poets and critics judge innovative poetic diction: in both cases there is a premium on what cannot otherwise be said. The paper proceeds to deepen the analogies between these two modes of judgement. It starts by linking the lack of rules for determining the acceptability of new words and phrases in everyday speaking with the indifference to prior rules associated with aesthetic judgement in Kant’s third critique, and apparent in the appraisals of many a contemporary poetry critic. It turns to consider the claim that what motivates the judgements under consideration is a preference in the human conceptual system for distinct symbols to have mutually exclusive meanings. A fourth section concerns what Construction Grammar, the broad field of Goldberg’s intervention, has to reveal about the conditions under which new words and phrases can take on meaning in the first place. This too has something to suggest about why we judge certain poetic efforts poor, others landed. Full article

This article explores the issues of phenomenon and genesis in Early Buddhist thought through a comparative analysis with the Eleatic tradition, aiming to enrich the understanding and dialogue between these philosophical and religious traditions. By examining the comparability of Buddhist thought and Parmenidean philosophy, the study challenges the notion that these traditions are fundamentally alien to each other. The focus is on the concept of genesis, not as creation from nothingness—rejected by both the Buddha and Parmenides—but as the manifestation of the world to the human observer. The article argues that the world reveals itself in particular forms and appearances, which are intimately linked to the phenomenon and its perception by humans. This process is not solely a domain of rigid logical propositions but can be expressed through mythological and religious narratives. The study posits that the poetic expressiveness found in archaic philosophies of both India and Greece provides a valid medium for engaging in philosophical discourse. By adopting this comparative and dialogical perspective, the article aims to generate new philosophical insights and inspire future philosophical inquiry. The reflection on phenomenon and genesis, framed through this comparative lens, highlights the nuanced ways in which different traditions address the nature of reality and human perception, ultimately advocating for a broader, more inclusive understanding of philosophy that transcends conventional boundaries. Full article

This article examines a problematic of the ordinary as it emerges in the poetical theology of an early poem of John Milton. This poem, Lycidas, has captured the attention of every major critic from the 18th century to the present, who has minutely examined its odd formal and generic character, its peculiar mix of personal grief and political outrage, and its role in Milton’s own personal development at a particularly decisive moment in English history. Yet, despite this extensive interpretive history, ‘the ordinary’ has never become an extended object of critical analysis. This article accordingly seeks to uncover and examine the importance of a certain set of contemporaneous significations of the ordinary in Lycidas, which implicate the institutions of Church, state, and university in perhaps surprising ways. Full article

In this paper I hope to cast light on Wittgenstein enigmatic remark, “one should really only create philosophy poetically”. I discuss Wittgenstein’s ambition to overcome metaphysics by way of an appeal to ordinary language. For this purpose I contrast “realism” in philosophy (i.e., metaphysical realism, particularly its modern scientific version) with “realism” in poetry. My theme is the capacity of poetry to provide a model for Wittgenstein’s resistance to the inhumanity unleashed in metaphysics—exemplified by two distinct forms of skepticism—which obliterates the ordinary world under the guise of discovering its true nature. The poem I shall use to illustrate the difficulty in maintaining our grip on reality, hence our grip on our humanity, is Czeslaw Milosz’s poem “Realism”. Full article

This article explores the ethics of “speaking” the artistic languages or idioms of diverse cultures in the earliest Christian communities. This article presents a key New Testament text, the Song of Zechariah (the Benedictus in Luke 1:68–79), as a poetic text meant for communal performance and examines that cultural phenomenon through the lens of “musical caring” to examine the meaning such a poetic phenomenon has for modern Christian life and worship. First, I will briefly summarize the evidence for the Song of Zechariah as a lyrical poem containing the artistic “multilingualism” of both Hebrew and Greek poetic idioms. Then, I will assess such an artistic communal expression in its first-century context with Myrick’s concept of musical caring, broadened to allow for uncertainty of the Song of Zechariah’s first-century performance methods. Finally, I will consider the twenty-first-century implications or lessons from such care and inclusivity in the first century. Full article

Theoretically, a poem can begin in any way. What does it mean that in practice, poems often begin in a particular way—that is, by returning to a fragment of some prior thing? We see this in the encore of John Milton’s opening to Lycidas (‘Yet once more, O ye laurels, and once more’); differently, we see this in the widely used convention of the poetic epigraph (for instance, T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ begins with six lines from Dante’s Inferno). While there is an established model for understanding the beginning as an act that invokes poetic precedent, this paper seeks to expose the beginning’s logic of return to a broader sense of language that is beyond the remit of poetic tradition as such. With a focus on the epigraph, this paper thinks about the everyday existence of poems and about how this existence relates to ordinary language, asking, how do these different modes of language function together? How does ordinary language collude in the creation of poetry? In its enactment of the passage of language from one mode of existence to another, the beginning of a poem might offer some answers to these questions. Full article