xvi + 253 pp.
£27.50 / $42.50 / €37.50
Scholar's Price
£55 / $85 / €75
List Price
Hardback
 |
Simulating Aichele
Essays in Bible, Film, Culture and Theory
Edited by Melissa C. Stewart
|
Simulating Aichele pays tribute to the title of George Aichele’s 2011 book, Simulating Jesus. In contemporary biblical scholarship, Aichele is a notable leader whose writings explore the problems of meaning and referentiality in the Bible and in biblical texts found in non-biblical contexts. His close readings of canonical texts alongside ‘the fantastic’ in film, television and literature reveal the relationships between texts and intertexts. Such juxtapositions expose gaps and liberate strange voices in the Bible and break the stranglehold of canonical ideologies. Aichele shows how the afterlives of biblical texts simultaneously produce present and past realities by simulating both. These afterlives not only pull ancient texts into the present but in the process also change the precursor text(s).
This Festschrift presents some of the afterlives of Aichele’s research in Bible, film, culture and theory. Exercises in intertextuality and textual liberation include Yvonne Sherwood’s reading of Jacob and Esau alongside a Sierra Leone twin story ‘Kanu and the Book’; Richard Walsh’s pairing of Jesus’ final lament in Mark with Kafka’s ‘In the Penal Colony’; Tina Pippin’s exploration of the afterlives of Jesus’ baptism in Mark; Gary A. Phillips’s ethical imagining of Martha as the Levinasian Other; and Scott S. Elliott’s interpretation of 1 Corinthians 9 in light of Roland Barthes’ ‘Neutral’. Other contributors explore Bible and film. Robert Paul Seesengood and Jennifer L. Koosed review recent apocalyptic films; Fred W. Burnett analyses the greatest contemporary slacker, the Dude, from The Big Lebowski; and Erin Runions compares the panoptic desire for complete knowledge found in 1 Corinthians and A Scanner Darkly. Finally, Roland Boer looks at the unexpected afterlives of Hebrew and Christian scriptures in Lenin’s speeches, and Stephen D. Moore offers a retrospective essay on postmodernism and biblical studies.
Melissa Stewart is Professor of Religion and Philosophy at Adrian College, Adrian, Michigan. |
|
Contents
SECTION ONE: BIBLE
KANU AND THE BOOK
Yvonne Sherwood
THE END OF THE MARKAN GOD—JESUS’ CRY OF DERELICTION
Richard Walsh
BEHOLD THE SONS OF MAN: FANTASY AND THE MARKAN MESSIAHS
Tina Pippin
ONE THING THAT IS NEEDED: LUKE, LEVINAS, AND INDELIBLY ETHICAL READING
Gary A. Phillips
WHAT IS PAUL? MYTHOLOGY AND THE NEUTRAL IN 1 CORINTHIANS 9.19-23
Scott S. Elliott
SECTION TWO: FILM
SPECTACULAR FINISH: APOCALYPSE IN/AND THE DESTRUCTION OF THE EARTH IN FILM
Robert Paul Seesengood and Jennifer L. Koosed
THE CHARACTERIZATION OF THE DUDE AND WOMEN IN THE BIG LEBOWSKI : THE DUDE AS SLACKER
Fred Burnett
THE THEOPOLITICS OF PANOPTIC MURK: A SCANNER DARKLY CITES 1 CORINTHIANS
Erin Runions
SECTION THREE: CULTURE AND THEORY
THE BIBLICAL RHETORIC OF VLADIMIR ULIANOV (LENIN)
Roland Boer
THE SLIGHT RISE AND PRECIPITOUS DECLINE OF POSTMODERNISM IN BIBLICAL STUDIES
Stephen D. Moore
|
Reviews
Simulating Aichele presents essays by eleven scholars deeply indebted to the work of George Aichele, emeritus of Adrian College, Michigan, a key figure in the postmodern turn in biblical studies of the late 1980s and, ever since, a prolific author whose scholarship has consistently undermined the Bible’s ideological authority, in particular by means of his dogged focus on intertextuality … Stewart’s brief, genial introduction describes the contributors’ essays as so many “afterlives” of Aichele’s many, and ongoing, contributions to the study of the Bible. … These “afterlives” reveal the great diversity of Aichele’s work but also his consistent goal of weakening the Bible’s damaging ideological authority while also, as he almost puts it at the end of The Phantom Messiah, whipping up the “subversive ferment” of biblical texts liberated from belief (2006, 233). Jay Twomey, Review of Biblical Literature.
|
|
