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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
The Speech Act Of Swearing: Gregory Of Nazianzus’S Oath In Poema 2.1.2 In Context, Suzanne Abrams Rebillard
The Speech Act Of Swearing: Gregory Of Nazianzus’S Oath In Poema 2.1.2 In Context, Suzanne Abrams Rebillard
School of Information Studies - Post-doc and Student Scholarship
Gregory of Nazianzus’s Poemata de seipso as a group are labeled “autobiography” erroneously. 2.1.2 provides a strong case study: it is formally structured as an oath, to be sworn by a bishop but with no definitive identification of speaker. As an oath it is well suited to the application of speech act theory, which allows for interpretations with Gregory and/or any orthodox bishop as speaker. When further considered in light of other oaths as compositional models—professional (e.g. Hippocratic), magisterial, imperial loyalty, biblical— the poem’s scope expands beyond the “autobiographer” to encompass the episcopate and fourth-century culture more broadly.
2010 Naps Presidential Address: "Fleeing The Kingdom": Augustin's Queer Theology Of Marriage, Virginia Burrus
2010 Naps Presidential Address: "Fleeing The Kingdom": Augustin's Queer Theology Of Marriage, Virginia Burrus
Religion - All Scholarship
Might attending to the texture of bodies in Augustine’s theology of marriage open up new interpretive possibilities? Eve Kosofky Sedgwick and Patricia Cox Miller give theoretical cues, Danuta Shanzer philological ones, for a dialogical reading of On the Good of Marriage and Confessions that seeks to defamiliarize, complicate, and broaden—in several senses, to queer—traditional interpretations of Augustinian marital theology. Shame and vulnerability, fear and desire, pain and pleasure, are all surfaced, as Augustine depicts marital figures that are shot through with ambivalence—open and torn, cut and bleeding, both cleaving to one another and ripped apart. Ultimately, he attempts to …
A Saint Of One’S Own: Emmanuel Levinas, Eliezer Ben Hyrcanus, And Eulalia Of Mérida, Virginia Burrus
A Saint Of One’S Own: Emmanuel Levinas, Eliezer Ben Hyrcanus, And Eulalia Of Mérida, Virginia Burrus
Religion - All Scholarship
Shame and sanctity are intimately related in ancient "lives" of Jewish sages and Christian ascetics. Infinitely other, saints (from Eliezer to Eulalia) are also infinitely seductive in the audacity of their willful abjection. Drawing desire beyond law, hagiography evokes "not ethics alone," but "le saint, la sainteté du saint" (Levinas).
Carnal Excess: Flesh At The Limits Of Imagination, Virginia Burrus
Carnal Excess: Flesh At The Limits Of Imagination, Virginia Burrus
Religion - All Scholarship
This essay explores representations of fleshly excess in Christian and Jewish texts of the late fourth and fifth centuries, from the cosmically-scaled figures of Adam and the resurrected Christ in Genesis Rabbah and Augustine's City of God, on the one hand, to the hagiographical portraits of fat rabbis and monks in the tractate Baba Metsia of the Babylonian Talmud and the Lausiac History of Palladius, on the other. The Platonic figure of the khora is initially invoked to frame two main arguments: first, that these late ancient texts discover transcendence within, rather than outside of, the boundlessness of materiality; …
Mimicking Virgins: Colonial Ambivalence And The Ancient Romance, Virginia Burrus
Mimicking Virgins: Colonial Ambivalence And The Ancient Romance, Virginia Burrus
Religion - All Scholarship
Burrus pursues juxtapositional readings of two sets of novelistic texts that cut across religious affiliations and the politics commonly associated therewith: the Acts of Paul and Thekla and Achilles Tatius's Kleitophon and Leukippe, on the one hand, and Heliodorus's Ethiopian Story and Joseph and Aseneth, on the other. Reading for resistance, she also reads for virginity, which functions as a site of articulated cultural ambivalence in each of the romances. That virginity is a characteristic and historically innovative preoccupation of ancient romances is scarcely a novel proposition.
Reading Agnes: The Rhetoric Of Gender In Ambrose And Prudentius, Virginia Burrus
Reading Agnes: The Rhetoric Of Gender In Ambrose And Prudentius, Virginia Burrus
Religion - All Scholarship
Readings of two late fourth-century versions of the tale of the virgin martyr Agnes illumine the place of gender within a late ancient Christian discourse that locates itself in complex relation to both a Christian and a classical past. In Ambrose's account, the tale of Agnes, juxtaposed with that of Thecla, constitutes a reworking of the apocryphal tale of the conversion and witness of a sexually continent woman. In Prudentius' text, allusions to the virginal heroine of classical tragedy represent Agnes as a new Polyxena. Through such intertextual play, the ambiguously gendered virgin martyr emerges not only as a model …