Eugen Warkentin Warkentin itibaren Gachsaran, Kohgiluyeh Va Boyer Ahmad, Iran itibaren Gachsaran, Kohgiluyeh Va Boyer Ahmad, Iran

Amazing book. Wonderful to read (if somewhat over-flowery at points). This does what any great book should do: causes you to think of something in a whole new way, sheds further light on the text, and creates new pathways of meaning from which to take extensive journeys. I particularly liked its discussions of contrastive dialogue, narrative analogy, word-choice, Leitworter, and ambiguity. I particularly agree with him when it comes to the "historical" process (trying to peer back behind the text to reconstruct its history) that we are on far more stable and certain ground when we are dealing with questions of the text before us instead of the hypothetical elements of a past we have no direct access to. I do have some serious issues with it, however. I will limit these observations to three (though there are many more). First, if Alter was reacting against a sort of "tyranny" of "excavative" work on the text, he has done what many others do who are taking an opposing stance - he takes it too far. As one example, he ends up saying that Esther "demonstrates God's providential power in history with a schematic neatness" despite the fact that God is entirely absent in the text and contributes nothing to the story, which is why all the Greek versions added "providential power" into it and probably why not one scrap of it was found among the Dead Sea Scrolls (it has nothing to say about God). It is only through Alter's harmonizing narratology that something so specifically about what happens when God is ABSENT can be made to speak about God's presence. Second, what Alter does is really nothing more than an expanded form of Redaction Criticism, which existed long before him. And yet he makes no mention of it. I was doing Redaction Criticism before I read this and much of what he says, I was already doing. Third--and this is perhaps the most important point of criticism--what Alter is doing (in the way that makes his method unique) is NEW. He admits this outright when he says that not even the Midrashists conceived of his narratology. Alter is reading the text in a way that NO ANCIENT JEW would have. Now, this doesn't necessarily mean that reading it in that way is flagrantly anti-scriptural. But we do need to acknowledge that if we are going to do such a thing--if we are going to look at something from the past in a way that no ancient person who produced it, who guarded it, who interpreted it, and who depended on it for their very souls would have done--that it probably isn't going to fit very easily into the Modern frame we are forcing it into.

Loved this book. I learned more about snails than I ever thought possible and saw how focus on another living thing can make severe illness bearable.

Quien no tenga una idea de la importancia de las Tragedias griegas, no tiene noción de la formación de la cultura occidental y del punto de partida de la cultura contemporánea: la escisión y su función esencial en la resolución y desarrollo de la vida social e individual. La lectura de las Tragedias clásicas es una vuelta retrospectiva a sí mismo, es ver viéndose, saber sabiéndose: es conocerse a sí mismo. De ahí la indispensable lectura que debe hacer de ella todo aquél que quiere incorporarse al conocimiento de la civilización humana y, en consecuencia, de su propio 'ser en el mundo'. José Rafael Herrera