Saturday, January 26, 2008

Reviewing, Literary Criticism, and "Bad Taste"


This post was one I was going to put up directly after the Internet Event of Stupendous Proportions, but the rather more serious Internet Event of Even More Stupendous Proportions Concerning Allegations of Plagiarism intervened.

However, the original Event did spark some thoughts which still seem relevant. They're mostly Sarah's thoughts, so I'll quote from her at length, but I'll also throw in something that Sandra wrote recently, as well as mixing in a good stiffening of Northrop Frye and a sprinkling of quotes from a variety of other sources. I hope the end result won't be too indigestible.

Sarah wrote that:
The one thing this exercise has done for me is show me again how different are the tasks of reviewing and literary criticism. [...] I can analyze a book I despise (did it for my dissertation!), because it’s not about personal taste, but about what I can say about the book’s _______ (construction, organization, historical context, images of gender/class/race, etc.). When I was a baby graduate student, one of my advisers said “It’s not about whether I like the book, but whether I can say anything interesting about it” and I was horrified! Shocked, I tell you! And I promised myself I’d never get to that point. But getting to that point was what learning how to be a literary critic was all about. And I actually ended up arguing in my dissertation that analyzing books we dislike is *important* to understanding the culture we’re trying to analyze. It’s just as important, in fact, as analyzing books we love. [...]

As my husband just pointed out to me as I read this to him, you’ll notice that Laura and Eric and I never said in our posts whether we liked the book. That came up later in comments [...]. Because in reading the book in order to analyze it, liking it or not was not part of my thought process. [...]

All this is to say that I really love reading the reviews [...] but it’s a completely different skill from literary criticism (which is not to say you guys don’t analyze–you do, but in totally different ways from what we do at TMT), and that fact boggles my mind every time I read a really good review, even (especially?) if the book is awful (or, more likely, just not brilliant).
Northrop Frye also described this difference between the task of the reviewer (whom he called "the public critic") and that of the literary critic. He stated that
It is the task of the public critic to exemplify how a man of taste uses and evaluates literature, and thus show how literature is to be absorbed into society. But here we no longer have the sense of an impersonal body of consolidating knowledge. The public critic tends to episodic forms like the lecture and the familiar essay, and his work is not a science, but another kind of literary art. (8)
If reviews are "another kind of literary art" that may explain why some of them, the better ones, can entertain, infuriate, amuse and/or move us, even though we may never read the novel the reviewer is writing about.

Literary critics, on the other hand, are much less likely to move their reader emotionally, although we may frequently be irritating and can occasionally attempt to amuse our readers. Literary criticism at its best creates a sense of intellectual awe at the way in which the critic has succeeded in marshalling the evidence from the text and other relevant sources into an orderly, logical form. Frye asks:
What if criticism is a science as well as an art? Not a "pure" or "exact" science, of course [...]. The writing of history is an art, but no one doubts that scientific principles are involved in the historian's treatment of evidence, and that the presence of this scientific element is what distinguishes history from legend. (7)
It seems absurd to say that there may be a scientific element in criticism when there are dozens of learned journals based on the assumption that there is, and hundreds of scholars engaged in a scientific procedure related to literary criticism. Evidence is examined scientifically; previous authorities are used scientifically; fields are investigated scientifically; texts are edited scientifically. Prosody is scientific in structure; so is phonetics; so is philology. (8)
Everyone who has seriously studied literature knows that the mental process involved is as coherent and progressive as the study of science. A precisely similar training of the mind takes place, and a similar sense of the unity of the subject is built up. (10-11)
Yes, and those like Sandra, who are forced to read the work of fledgling literary critics are more than aware of quite how much training is required in order to master the rules of the subject:
  1. Document your frigging sources! ALL of them!!! No matter whether you use direct or indirect quotations. (If you don't document your sources, your teacher will be p.o. and you will fail the class.)
  2. Prove your statements by referring either to the primary text(s) or to secondary sources.
  3. It helps if you stick to the facts that are mentioned in the primary text: if the hero's childhood is never mentioned anywhere in the text, analysing the hero's childhood is ... not such a good idea.
  4. Fictional characters are not real people.
  5. Making sweeping statements about the historical background of a literary text is usually not a very good idea either: because if you do, you have not only failed to stick to Rule #2, but in most cases you are also spectacularly wrong.
  6. Logic is a fine thing. Apply it freely and apply it often.
  7. All primary and secondary sources you use in your paper should be listed in the bibliography.
  8. The bibliography is supposed to consist of more than one secondary source.
The implication of Frye's assessment that literary criticism is a science is that:
at no point is there any direct learning of literature itself. Physics is an organized body of knowledge about nature, and a student of it says that he is learning physics, not nature. Art, like nature, has to be distinguished from the systematic study of it, which is criticism. It is therefore impossible to "learn literature": one learns about it in a certain way, but what one learns, transitively, is the criticism of literature. Similarly, the difficulty often felt in "teaching literature" arises from the fact that it cannot be done: the criticism of literature is all that can be directly taught. Literature is not a subject of study, but an object of study [...]. Criticism [...] is to art what history is to action [...]: a verbal imitation of a human productive power (11-12).
The reviewer, however, is giving a description of his or her experience of reading a text (for example whether it was a disappointment or a gripping read, how the reviewer related to the characters, whether the plot carried the reviewer along or whether her suspended disbelief crashed to the ground through a plot hole). SB Candy recently wrote a post about "bad taste" in which she stated that
unlike the absolute relativists (how d’you like THAT particular turn of phrase, eh?), I do think there’s such a thing as objective measures for how good or bad a book is, and that sometimes, you love something absolutely terrible, and other times, you dislike something that’s actually good.
The literary critic, as Sarah noted, does not primarily concern him or herself with his or her experience as a reader of the text, or with making declarations about "good" or "bad" taste, but instead relates to the texts in a very different, much less emotional way: placing the text in a literary context, providing textual evidence for his or her assertions, and not deliberately distorting the evidence by omitting to mention counter-evidence also present in the text.

Although there were some dissenting voices, the majority of reviewers seemed to feel, with Candy, that "Wulfric is a politically correct hero, and hot damn, does that ever make him tiresome," and Meriam observed that there is something "deeply ironic [in the fact] that a novel which disproves many of Bindel's charges against romance failed to satisfy so many romance readers. What can you do?" Some time ago Jayne Ann Krentz wrote about some young editors who tried to change the genre in response to criticism like Bindel's:
The first target of these reforming editors was what has come to be known in the trade as the alpha male. These males are the tough, hard-edged, tormented heroes that are at the heart of the vast majority of bestselling romance novels. These are the heroes who made Harlequin famous. These are the heroes who carry off the heroines in historical romances. These are the heroes feminist critics despise.
[...] Why did we dig in our heels and resist the effort to turn our hard-edged, dangerous heroes into sensitive, right-thinking modern males?
[...] We did it because, in the romance genre, the alpha male is the one that works best in the fantasy. (107-108, emphasis added)
I'm a literary critic, not a psychologist, so I'm not going to venture into in-depth discussions of people's fantasies, particularly when they're ones I don't share, but I think this internet event has been more than a condensed version of that long-ago experiment described by Krentz. As Sarah said, it's illustrated the difference between reviews and literary criticism, and from the point of view of literary criticism, as Eric said on the Romance Scholar list:
This really is a big deal [...] because for the first time that I know of romance readers and reviewers and scholars are all focusing, however briefly, on the same book at the same time, as part of a concerted effort. (It's also the first time that I know of when a single category romance has been written about at length by multiple scholars. Few romance novels get any critical attention at all; I'd love to see this as a model for future group efforts.)
  • Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. 1957. Oxford: Princeton UP, 2000.
  • Krentz, Jayne Ann. "Trying to Tame the Romance: Critics and Correctness." Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women: Romance Writers on the Appeal of the Romance. Ed. Jayne Ann Krentz. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1992. 107-14.


The image is of Christine de Pisan giving a lecture. It's taken from Wikipedia. She wrote poetry, prose and engaged in literary criticism:
As a feminist, Christine de Pizan directly challenged the destructive and demeaning attitudes towards women of a popular book of her day, Le Roman de la Rose, by writing Epistres du debat sur le Roman de la Rose (c. 1402), and arguing rather for the equality of women. (A Celebration of Women Writers).
As we've been discussing ferrets, I can't help but note that this latter work included the line "And do you not know that a small weasel is able to attack and destroy a great lion?"

21 comments:

  1. I wouldn't exactly call Cassie Edwards a great lion! ;P

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  2. No, maybe not. But the ferrets are sweet, and the way in which the publicity about their plight has made something good come out of something bad does remind me a little of the Tate & Lyle logo (which features a lion, though not one killed by either a weasel or a ferret):

    The Lyle's Golden Syrup trademark depicts a quotation from the Bible.

    Sampson utters the words "Out of the eater came forth meat and out of the strong came forth sweetness" at his wedding in the Book of Judges, Chapter 14, after he recalls how a swarm of bees formed a honey comb in the carcass of a lion that he had slain.
    (from an article by Felix Lowe in The Telegraph, and there's a photo there of Tate & Lyle's slain lion logo).

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  3. To me one of the more intriguing questions about this recent plagiarism issue is: Why is that section in the romance novel (the "borrowed" section) so poorly written? From what I have heard even the scientist who wrote the original was surprised when he read it in that context and agreed that it was stylistically the weakest part of the novel. I think Eric, as usual, is right. The "big deal" is the concentrated focus on the romance novel. As an issue plagiarism seems overdone anyway. Wasn't Coleridge a plagiarist? And does that matter? And what about all those poems Wordsworth wrote thanks to his sister Dorothy?SHe doies deserve a lot more credit, I agree--but how much does taht matter now? And from what I understand, my hero Martin
    Luther King plagiarized a good amount of his dissertation at Boston University. I don't care--do you? And what about that character in McEwan's AMSTERDAM who thinks he has finally written the breakthrough symphony but unconsciously has "borrowed" Beethoven's ODE TO JOY? And what about Eliot's WASTELAND?DO teh footnotes matter? To say nothing about Bloom's theory on "the anxiety of influence." Bloom, in fact, once suggested that Arnold's "Scholar Gypsy" was a result of Arnold's "anxiety" after reading Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale." It certainly "borrows" the structure. I actually believe my students sometimes when they tell me that they did't realize they were plagairizing parts of their essays. Our lives are always intertextaulized, I bet.

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  4. I guess reviewing a book is to criticizing it as reviewing a restaurant is to performing an autopsy.

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  5. To me one of the more intriguing questions about this recent plagiarism issue is: Why is that section in the romance novel (the "borrowed" section) so poorly written? From what I have heard even the scientist who wrote the original was surprised when he read it in that context and agreed that it was stylistically the weakest part of the novel.

    Did Tolmé really say that the bit of dialogue which included the words from his article was "stylistically the weakest part of the novel"? I thought he'd said that it felt out of place, which is different.

    The person who originally raised doubts about Cassie Edwards's books was alerted to the issue via the change in register in the descriptive passages of the Edwards novel she read. This doesn't mean that these passages are in themselves stylistically weaker. Indeed, given that some passages have been found from the Pulitzer prize winning novel Laughing Boy it may be that some of these passages are stylistically superior to those which cannot be traced to another author's work. Tolmé's article was written as non-fiction, and therefore its style was different, not inferior, to that of the fictional text in which it was later used.

    It seems to have been the juxtaposition of different registers and writing styles which created an uneavenness in Cassie Edwards's novels, but I don't think there's any evidence that the passages, such as Tolmé's or Oliver La Forge's, were "poorly written."

    I think Eric, as usual, is right. The "big deal" is the concentrated focus on the romance novel.

    I'm sure Eric will be most flattered by your opinion, but in this particular case, the quotation from Eric does not contain any of his opinions about the Cassie Edwards affair. His email was written solely in response to the blogging about Louise Allen's novel, Virgin Slave, Barbarian King. Eric's email was written on the 5th of January, and the news about Cassie Edwards's novels didn't break until the 7th of January.

    I don't care--do you?

    Yes, I do.

    And what about all those poems Wordsworth wrote thanks to his sister Dorothy?SHe doies deserve a lot more credit, I agree--but how much does taht matter now?

    Well, for a start, it matters to those whose reading of the poems is influenced by their knowledge of the poet (whom they assume is Wordsworth). It also matters to those who are concerned with the way that the literary canon is dominated by dead white men.

    Being partly composed of plagiarised material may or may not affect the value of a text (although, as suggested by our discussion above, if the plagiarized material is not well-integrated into the new context, it may well have a negative effect on the style and coherence of the whole text). Allegations of plagiarism will certainly affect one's understanding of the author's methods of working, his/her level of talent and his/her understanding of ethics and/or one's understanding of how the subconscious works (in cases where the plagiarism is subconscious).

    I guess reviewing a book is to criticizing it as reviewing a restaurant is to performing an autopsy.

    Thanks for that delightful image, Talpianna! I suppose I can't really complain, seeing as I was the one who introduced the lion's corpse into the discussion. I think your analogy would work if both the food critic and the forensic scientist were cutting up an animal. The food critic wants to know about the taste of the animal and whether it was served up in a congenial atmosphere etc. The analogy is probably even closer if the scientist is one who works in food science, and so has an interest in the nutritional value of the animal, whether the particular cooking method has made it more tender etc. A food scientist might also be interested in analysing the psychology of the food critic - why the critic chose this particular dish, whether the critic's childhood experiences/cultural context (including religious beliefs) gave the critic a dislike of eating seafood, etc.

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  6. why the critic chose this particular dish, whether the critic's childhood experiences/cultural context (including religious beliefs) gave the critic a dislike of eating seafood, etc.

    However, if the critic is a character in a book and his childhood is nowhere mentioned in the book, we really don't want to know about his childhood. Or about any connections between his childhood and Egyptian pyramids. (Teaching fairy tales or medieval literature can produce rather strange results.)

    Allegations of plagiarism will certainly affect one's understanding of the author's methods of working, his/her level of talent and his/her understanding of ethics and/or one's understanding of how the subconscious works

    It also affects our understanding and knowledge of literary production in different cultural contexts and at different points in time, as well as our knowledge of approaches to literature at different points in time. Just think of European medieval romance, or plays and chapbooks in early modern times: it was common practice to take older or even contemporary sources, translate them, add to them, revise them, combine them with other texts, etc.

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  7. if the critic is a character in a book and his childhood is nowhere mentioned in the book, we really don't want to know about his childhood

    Very true. I was thinking in particular of the work that's been done on romance readers.

    it was common practice to take older or even contemporary sources, translate them, add to them, revise them, combine them with other texts, etc

    There certainly wasn't the modern understanding of copyright, so people did feel free to make copies, but at the same time there was great respect for some original sources/authors, so medieval authors often refer to them, albeit sometimes in vague terms, such as "as the philosopher says."

    Also, a lot of medieval works were anonymous, and were copied anonymously, which is rather different from someone substituting their own name for that of the original named author, and there are, of course, the reworkings of well-known legends and stories, but as would be the case when a modern author does that, it's not plagiarism if the reader is expected to know the original source.

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  8. Laura, yes, that's what I meant when I mentioned different approaches to literature and literary production. :)

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  9. Borrowed sections? Stolen sections. Which jump out the text because, as said much better by Laura Vivanco, the voice in those is utterly different from CE's writing.

    And I care, along with a good many others, or there wouldn't have been so much noise. It's disingenuous to imply that no one should care after so many people have spoken up about it, don't you think?

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  10. Laura, what Tolmé actually said was that it made for "clunky dialogue," which is a reasonable statement since it wasn't WRITTEN as dialogue. As popular science writing, it's just fine.

    In my food critic analogy, I was thinking more about comments about whether the seasoning was overdone or inappropriate, whether the presentation added to the pleasure of the meal or detracted from it, the size of the portions, etc.--in other words, focusing on the experience of eating the meal. I wish I'd remembered to say "food critic" instead of "restaurant critic" as it makes the analogy closer. The scientist (and I'm pretty sure food scientists don't perform autopsies or necropsies, so it would probably be either a pathologist or a vet) is interested in how the animal is put together, if there are any deformities or abnormalities, and of course why it got dead.

    Revised analogy: A review is to a critique as a restaurant review is to an autopsy. (My original example was dissecting a fetal pig in biology class, but that's really not any better, is it?)

    And as I said somewhere already, originality didn't become a virtue in literature until the Romantic Era, so people ALWAYS claimed original ancient sources, even if they didn't exist (like Chaucer's "mine auctour Lollius," whom he made up to conceal the fact that he was actually ripping off TROILUS AND CRISEYDE from Boccaccio.

    And don't miss Candy's wonderful piece over at SMART BITCHES on plagiarism and literary conventions. Especially the splendid analytical chart on page 2--best bit of creative criticism since I invented the pastoral limerick!

    http://tinyurl.com/yotbms

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  11. Reading your posts about literary criticism/reviewing has made me think about my own most frequent writing, i.e. writing sermons, which in my Presbyterian tradition requires exegesis and analysis of a particular ancient and immutable text (the Bible) and its application to contemporary life.

    The Bible, of course, is not one homogeneous text but a collection of wildly diverse texts from different times, perspectives, languages, and purposes (the book of Genesis, for example, begins with two distinctly different creation stories).

    As you have pointed out, one can certainly exegete/critique texts without liking them--there are lots of horrifying bits in the Bible that I would just as soon forget (how about the story of concubine from Judges 19:22 and following?) --and the perpetual challenge for the preacher (if not the critic) is to derive some sort of meaning from those texts, a "take-home message," if you will, that enlightens and informs the reader/listener.

    I was an English major, so my approach to the Bible will probably always be a more literary critical one--using historical information and theological tradition to set the scene if necessary, but attempting to engage the text itself as primary, looking for clues to meaning within the text itself, seeing each text as containing its own vision of reality/truth. Among the many Things I Learned In Seminary is that many secondary sources for Biblical interpretation are so profoundly ridiculous that the only sure source of information is the text itself. (Once when I was preparing a sermon on Judges 4/5, the story of Deborah, I found a not-so-long-ago commentary that stated categorically, "Deborah couldn't have been a judge because she was a woman. . ."--when it says right in Judges 4:4 "At that time Deborah was judging Israel." Hello!)

    I do, sometimes, take on the "reviewer" role from the pulpit. Sometimes I am honest and say, "This passage is horrible, nobody likes it, why is it in the Bible, and what use could it possibly be to us?" And, like the Smart Bitches, sometimes I find myself LOVING things that are AWFUL (like Jael hammering the tent peg through Sisera's head, or when Ehud runs fat King Eglon through with a sword and the fat comes up and closes behind the hilt). (Gross but fascinating.)

    Of course, although preaching uses many of the same tools wielded by academics of various stripes, it's not by nature "academic." So I can bring in Northrup Frye, but I can also bring in Oprah.

    I can also use some familiar phrases without specific footnoted attribution, such as "faith, hope, and love", or bits of Martin Luther King--stuff sufficiently in the public domain that everyone knows its source--my hope being that those phrases will provide cultural and spiritual resonance for the listening congregation.

    I've gone on way too long. Thank you for letting me think out loud!

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  12. Yikes, Melinda! I just read Judges 19! What DO you get out of that in the way of spiritual uplift and enlightenment???

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  13. the perpetual challenge for the preacher (if not the critic) is to derive some sort of meaning from those texts

    Yes, unlike literary critics you don't have a lot of choice about which text your sermon is going to be based on (well, you can always preach from your favourite parts, but someone's bound to notice and start asking you why you're ignoring the other parts), and you have to find some positive meaning in it. A literary critic has much more choice and can decide that something isn't worth studying and move on to a completely different author/text.

    I'm also wondering if one of the big differences between doing literary criticism and writing sermons is that if you're doing literary criticism you can point out contradictions in an author's treatment of an issue, or problematic changes in characterisation and you can just leave it at that. You don't have to write apologetics. [In case anyone is wondering, I'm meaning that in the technical sense of "biblical apologetics."]

    If you're writing a sermon you have to assume that there is coherence in your text and that there's a theologically acceptable explanation for some of the less palatable actions which appear in it, and then you have to present that to your congregation.

    I'm assuming that in cases like this:

    Sometimes I am honest and say, "This passage is horrible, nobody likes it, why is it in the Bible, and what use could it possibly be to us?

    you do still go ahead and find a use for it. You don't just end the sermon by saying that there isn't one, do you?

    To be fair, if a work is "canonical" in the literary sense, like a Shakespeare play, the literary critic's also going to be under some pressure to find value and meaning in the text, even if he/she initially thinks that this particular play is badly constructed/trite etc. But obviously the pressure isn't of the same type as with biblical exegesis, where it could be considered heretical to have similar doubts about the Bible, and schisms can occur when people have different interpretations, or when people want to add to/remove certain parts of the text. Also, a literary critic's belief system isn't going to fall apart if he/she decides that she/he has a substantial disagreement with Thomas Hardy's world-view.

    I've gone on way too long. Thank you for letting me think out loud!

    It was interesting, as I've now gone on for too long, on a topic about which I know next to nothing, I hope you'll forgive me and any mistaken assumptions I've made.

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  14. Talpianna, I honestly don't think there's anything to get out of that passage in the way of spiritual uplift. It's just awful. I'm sure it's not in the lectionary (our three-year cycle of worship texts). Probably most people don't even know it exists, and I don't think any preacher would touch it with a ten-foot pole--at least without the fortification of three or four margaritas.

    Laura, your thinking about my post is masterful, as always. You're right that I can't just ignore problematic Biblical texts, that I'm obligated to try to find something (anything!) there. Most of the time there's something I can wring out, LOL.

    There are certainly contradictions in the Biblical text (witness the 2 different creation stories in Genesis, or the 4 very different gospels)--some of which can be explained by textual problems in the original language, and different authorship of different books/sections--and it's true that some more fundamentalist folks get all hot under the collar when that's pointed out. I find it fascinating, though--I like to sit with the mystery. (Sigh, I'm nuts.)

    There are canonical literary works I think are incomprehensible and ridiculous--Joyce's Ulysses, for one (I'm so sorry, I just hate that thing--I hope it's not one of your favorites?)--

    Thanks for letting me party with the Professors!

    Melinda

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  15. There are certainly contradictions in the Biblical text [...] -some of which can be explained by textual problems in the original language, and different authorship of different books/sections--and it's true that some more fundamentalist folks get all hot under the collar when that's pointed out. I find it fascinating, though--I like to sit with the mystery. (Sigh, I'm nuts.)

    You're not nuts. Can't some of this be explained in terms of the ineffable nature of God? It's like the parable of the blind men and the elephant, that there can be various interpretations and explanations, and all of them may be partially right, and you need to put together all the explanations to get a better understanding of the whole, and even then, in the case of God, there's still going to be much that is mysterious. So it's no wonder you feel like sitting with the mystery. Sometimes there's not a lot else you can do with it, and thinking you can totally explain it would be hubris. [I'd like to think that that's one underlying meaning of the story of the Tower of Babel, not that God literally worried that if humans all spoke the same language and succeeded in building the tower then "nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do".]

    Thanks for letting me party with the Professors!

    It was fun, and I liked the new angle your analysis of Virgin Slave, Barbarian King brought to the discussion. Literary criticism's also like trying to describe that elephant.

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  16. What a wonderful discussion this is! I've been swamped at work, and have no time to give a proper comment here, but it's been fascinating for me to hear your comments on Biblical exegesis and homily-writing, Melinda. As a Jew (a non-Orthodox Jew), I'm entirely comfortable with sermons that begin by pointing out how problematic this week's portion is; indeed, that's almost the standard opening line in most of the circles I frequent! I've never been to a Christian service where anything like that happened--it's simply not done in my wife's Catholic parish, for example. Fun to hear that it shows up in your church, too.

    As for Judges 19: well, it's one of those passages that rubs our nose in (male) human nature, teaching by contrast rather than by example. "Turn it, turn it, for everything is in it" say the Rabbis in Pirke Avot: everything, not just ennobling teachings or lessons to be learned. (Maybe the New Testament was written differently?)

    Judges--or "Warlords," which may be a more accurate translation--is a book about a community without law or justice or kings, a book of failures, mostly. It sets up the people's desire for a monarchy, for someone to put an end to the chaos. (Think Afganistan before the Taliban, who were initially welcomed by many as bringing some kind of order, some kind of law.) As my Rabbi likes to say about the Torah more generally, it "tells us nothing about God, but a whole lot about people."

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  17. Melinda: What that story inspires in me is the desire to treat it as a murder mystery. Was it a setup all along? Did he know what would happen to her and plan on having her raped to death to punish her for her "harlotry"? But for Scripture, if that were the case, there would have to be some sort of "God is not mocked" fate for HIM. As far as I can see, the only reaction was "Oh, wow!"

    Have you ever read one of the original Gothic novels, The Monk by Matthew Lewis? There is one scene in which the wicked monk is surprised to learn that his unbelievably innocent intended victim reads the Bible and still knows nothing of sex. When he checks her copy, he finds that it is one that her mother has copied out by hand for her, with all the naughty bits omitted.

    Did you see The Genesis Conversations series presented by Bill Moyers on PBS? It featured clerics, scholars, and writers of various Biblical traditions discussing some of the seminal Genesis stories. One of them is Faye Kellerman, who writes detective stories with Orthodox Jewish protagonists. Her take on Cain and Abel is fascinating.

    And, Eric, have you read the essays on the Holocaust in George Steiner's Language and Silence, especially the one that speculates on God's literally turning His back on His people?

    A book I return to over and over is The Sunflower by Simon Wiesenthal. It's a novella told in the first person (parable? true? not sure) about a concentration camp inmate doing forced labor on hospital grounds who is summoned to the bedside of a dying SS officer, who asks his forgiveness for his crimes against the Jews. It's a bit of a "lady or the tiger" ending, followed by a bunch of essays by clerics, scholars, and writers of various faiths on what he should have answered.

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  18. Talpianna, my husband (also a pastor) had somewhat of the same experience as the monk's victim--when he was a kid his mother read to him every night from the Bible, only she left out the naughty bits. He was quite surprised when he got to seminary and read the unexpurgated versions in his classes!

    Thomas Jefferson apparently took up scissors and cut out of his Bible any verses or sections he found offensive or objectionable.

    Eric, I love your comments, particularly the "turn it, turn it" saying. I'm going to remember that.

    I think I picked on Judges because Laura's use of the Samson story got my brain moving that way. I had a great class on Judges (LOVE the "warlords" translation!) and came to appreciate it--curiously enough, by doing literary critical analysis of it.

    Judges has the Song of Deborah which is probably the most ancient piece in the Bible, no doubt passed down orally before it was ever written, and Jael, who's my favorite woman in the Bible except for Mary Magdalene.

    When I was writing college papers I used to push myself beyond the boundaries of my thinking/writing by asking "So what?" at the end of every page or section, and then trying to answer that in the paper. In many ways my interest in religion is the pursuit of the ultimate "so what?"--and there's never an end to the "so what" questions, so it's an eternal quest for meaning and purpose. . .

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  19. Melinda, I thought (mistakenly) that Garry Wills had written a book on Jefferson's Bible; in searching for it, I found a number of other copies. It seems that he was not so much censoring it but making a condensed version of what he thought most important in it. It might be an interesting sermon topic to find out what he chose. I would assume that he was not so interested in cutting out "naughty bits" as in omitting ideas he didn't accept; as he was a deist, I imagine that original sin would be one of them.

    Have you ever been to Monticello? He has only three accomplishments inscribed on his tombstone there--he didn't think being President was worth mentioning:

    http://tinyurl.com/yvmxwl

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  20. Talpianna, I grew up close to Monticello (well, closer to Appomattox, but Monticello isn't far) and loved to go there as a child. (My parents took us to all the historic houses and battlefields. . .) It felt to me like "Mr. Jefferson" was just around the corner, and I used to close my eyes in the servant's passageways and imagine myself as part of the household (I always pictured myself as a servant, never as one of the family--I wonder why?).

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  21. Melinda, it's a beautiful, beautiful house, and it's full of ingenious things he invented, like the clock and the dumbwaiter and the folding desk.

    And then there are the slave quarters--sort of spoils the effect. Although Jefferson did want to abolish slavery--he called it "having a wolf by the ears."

    Oddly enough, your comment on not imagining yourself part of the family reminds me of something I was thinking about last night. You know Jayne Ann Krentz's theory about the heroine being a "placeholder" into whose role the reader can imagine herself? Well, that works for some characters, but not for others. As someone once said, readers don't want to marry Lord Peter Wimsey--they want to have tea with him. If I fantasize myself into that world, it's always as a friend of the family; one cannot imagine Peter with anyone but Harriet. It's the same with Eve Dallas and Roarke. Not so sure about Darcy and Elizabeth. And of course it's very easy if the hero is a choice item and the heroine is TSTL!

    WV: egmsf --for example, myself (as the true heroine, of course, not the TSTL one!)

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