Arts and Humanities Commons^™

New Farms Dead Sea Scrolls Video On National Tv Broadcast

Insights: The Newsletter of the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship

A one-hour TV special produced by the LDS Church Public Affairs Department showing highlights of the Dead Sea Scrolls conference, reported in the last two issues of INSIGHTS, will be featured on national TV on the VISN Showcase Saturday, March 13, at 7:00 P.M. MST, on the VISN/ACTS Cable Network. The program will also be broadcast on Monday, March 8, at 7:00 A.M. MST, and on Thursday, March 11, at 10:00 P.M. MST. VISN is an interfaith, national cable TV network that presents programs from a variety of religious perspectives, including weekly programs from the LDS Church.

Nibley Quote Book Revised & Reissued

Insights: The Newsletter of the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship

Of All Things, a book of quotations from Hugh Nibley compiled and edited by Gary Gillum, will be available again April 1 in a revised and expanded edition. Gillum has selected, from both published and unpublished writings, numerous quotations that illustrate Nibley's considerable wit and wisdom, creating a wonderful introduction to Nibley's life-long effort to make sense of the things of this world and the things of eternity.

Symposium Fosters Lively Discussion Of Ancient Temples

Insights: The Newsletter of the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship

The more than 1500 people who attended the sixth annual F.A.R.M.S. Symposium were rewarded with a wealth of information about temples of the ancient world. Elder Marion D. Hanks set the tone for the day in his keynote address. He reflected on quiet, daily miracles that occur in the temple and the desire that David expressed in Psalm 27 to "dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the Lord."

“What Could She Do Next?”: Margaret’S Power And Control Through Failed Emotional Labor In Elizabeth Gaskell’S North And South, Cianna Alano

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

Critics of Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South identify Margaret as an emotional laborer, but they emphasize how this is a detriment to Margaret rather than how she uses it to her advantage. Margaret’s role as an emotional laborer is, indeed, often unwanted and inconvenient, but she reappropriates this work to gain control of undesirable situations. Most notably, Margaret repeats this pattern when telling her mother of their imminent move to Milton, when dealing with the Higgins and Boucher families after familial deaths, and when attempting to stop rioters from hurting Mr. Thornton. Instead of just trying to complete the unwanted …

Cover And Front Matter

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

No abstract provided.

Full Issue

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

No abstract provided.

“Perfect In Her Eyes:” Domestic Retrenchment And Panoptical Resistance In Jane Austen’S Mansfield Park, Holden O. D'Evegnee

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

Mansfield Park features one of Jane Austen's most unique heroines, Fanny Price. Though Fanny is painfully shy—almost to the point of becoming the audience to her own story—she manages, by the end of the novel, to gain everything she wanted while the rest of her adopted family falls apart into disgrace or reform. Some critics see this as proof of Fanny’s monstrosity while others read Fanny’s ascent as a reward for her principled nature. Using recent postcolonial readings of Mansfield Park with Michel Foucault’s theory of panoptical surveillance, my goal is to show how Fanny Price subverts the colonial authority …

A Feminist Icon Or A Homicidal Coward: Medea’S Revenge On Patriarchy, Beyza Ertugrul

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

Medea, the alleged epitome of sophistication, does not deserve her title of the flawless feminist icon as she is praised to be. For context, Euripides’ Medea, first performed in 431 BC, portrays a young sorceress whose abusive husband abandons her for another woman and who takes revenge by murdering her own children to spite him. Throughout the tragedy, Medea speaks out on gender inequality, and by definition, such uncommon and advanced statements can be described by the modern term of feminism as the “belief in and advocacy of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes” (Merriam-Webster). Especially …

Shakespeare’S Prince Of Denmark: Political Pandering In Hamlet, Moriah Theriault

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

Shakespeare's Hamlet contains frequent cultural ties and insights into Danish tradition that depict intentional effort to represent Danish culture. These accuracies can be seen in the description of the castle in Elsinore, the deep-seated conflicts between Christian forgiveness and revenge, and the traditional cannon salutes featured in Hamlet. Shakespeare created these connections to Danish culture for a political maneuver to win the favor of King James and his wife, the Royal Queen Anne of Denmark.

Havens And Covens: Pregnancy, Witchcraft, And Female Power In Cotton Mather’S “Retired Elizabeth”, Brittney A. Hatchett

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

Over the decades, scholars have been holding two adjacent conversations about witchcraft and gender in Cotton Mather’s works that surprisingly have not been put in dialogue. On the one hand, they have examined Mather’s witchcraft ideology and motivations for involving himself in the Salem witch trials. On the other hand, scholars have discussed how Mather seeks to exert control over women spiritually and physically. However, no one has yet explored how these conversations might converge. I suggest that we can see how Mather intertwines discourses of witchcraft and gender in the section titled “Retired Elizabeth” in The Angel of Bethesda. …

The Rise Of The Machine: The Annihilation Of Human Connection In "The Rainbow", Elizabeth Miller

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

This essay analyzes the growth of industrialization in England at the turn of the century by examining D. H. Lawrence’s 1915 novel, The Rainbow. More specifically, this essay will focus on the role of machine culture and how the growing presence of industry acted as a catalyst for societal destruction. I argue that Lawrence defines machine culture as the worship of the machine, roboticism, the erasure of memory, and misogyny. These social constructs are exposed through the male characters in the novel to express Lawrence’s attitude toward the destructiveness of industrialization. He uses these characteristics to represent the type of …

Claude Mckay's Protest Sonnets, Lily Jensen

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

The sonnet tradition is rich with change. It is a genre forged in strict conventions: fourteen lines, iambic pentameter, a volta (or even multiple turns), and themes of praise and unrequited love. Because of these rules, sonneteers from Petrarch to Shakespeare, Donne to Rosetti, and Hopkins to Hughes have used this form and bent it to their own personal uses. The sonnet has an intense social, cultural, and political history. This paper analyzes how Claude Mckay both used the conventions of the sonnet tradition and broke from the sonnet tradition in the poems “If We Must Die” and “The Lynching” …

Recognizing Freedom: Zitkala-Ša's Fight For Native Citizenship, Camille J. Karpowitz

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

Minority groups protesting and petitioning for civil rights have been fundamental to United States history. Before the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, Zitkala-Ša, a Native American rights activist, positions herself as a voice for Native citizenship. Within the native community, however, the issue of citizenship was not as easily advocated for, due to past injustices perpetrated by the United States government. As a result, Zitkala-Ša has been labeled an assimilationist or one who connect to either Natives or Americans.

While her advocacy for citizenship does not go unnoticed by scholars, it is often ignored in her works outside of political …

Coping With Covid Through Tangled And Social Media, Maram Alturky

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

In response to the events of COVID-19 in 2020, social content creators found connections between their lives and the life of Rapunzel as represented in Disney’s 2010 retelling of the Rapunzel tale, Tangled. To show these connections, YouTube videos were made to highlight the similarities between people’s lives under quarantine and Rapunzel’s containment in the tower. While these videos were seemingly made to play on current life events, they illustrate the many ways in which fairy tales have been used to bridge the fantastical and reality when attempting to cope with trauma. This article explores the connections between fairy tales …

Exploring The Matriarchal Past To Forge A Modern Identity: Maternal Origins In Woolf And Ihimaera, Kirsten W. Burningham

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

Though the writings of Virginia Woolf and Witi Ihimaera are “incommensurable” in many ways, I find “commesurablilities”––the kind of commensurabilities the Susan Stanford Friedman seeks out across the planetary landscape of modernism––in the way they negotiate a new creative identity in a modern environment with the bang clash of history and present ringing in their ears. I see this commensurability in at least three key features: 1) Woolf and Ihimaera each gave birth to new literary movements: Woolf was mother to high British Modernism with experimental techniques such as free indirect discourse and the relegation of plot to the background; …

Women After Waterloo: Evolving Females In Jane Austen’S Persuasion, Madison Maloney

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

In Jane Austen’s last novel, Persuasion, she offers a glimpse into a character that breaks past the societal restraints women typically experience. Mrs. Croft, ostensibly, is the first Austen woman to find her way out of England; the Napoleon wars afford her the opportunity to travel the seas with her Admiral husband and participate in traditionally masculine experiences. Though other women in Austen novels do travel, they remain in-country, and they always find their way back to their original society. Throughout many wars in history, the absence of men as they fight in the military offers women the opportunity to …

Subverting Social Order: Investigating Class Critique In Homer’S Odyssey, Riley R. Mayes

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

The ‘Homeric Question,’ or the question of who Homer was, has long preoccupied the minds of the Western world (Foley 2). Due to the amorphous nature of oral tradition and the lost histories of ancient Greece, it is likely that this question may never be answered to satisfaction. However, what historical data we do have allows us to synthesize a composite character of who Homer might have been and, more importantly, what he represented. As we will explore, records reveal that the mythology of ancient Greece arose from the lower rungs of the social ladder; storytellers were often members of …

“Hopelessly Crippled”: The Construction Of Disability In Borges’S “Funes, His Memory”, Madilyn Abbe

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

In Jorge Luis Borges’s “Funes, His Memory,” the narrator presents Ireneo Funes as an intriguing example of both physical and cognitive atypicality. Although the narrator is quick to identify Funes’s deficiencies, he unashamedly acknowledges his own cognitive weaknesses as well. Using a literary disability studies lens, this article examines the construction of disability within the text, arguing that the narrator imposes disability onto Funes to mask the possibility that he be categorized as disabled. The narrator sets up an ableist binary to undermine Funes physically, yet this binary falls apart when applied to cognitive ability. In order to address this …

Henrietta Maria: Royalist Women’S Representations Of The French Catholic Queen, Kim Hansen

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

By the mid-15^th century, the royal marriage of King Charles and Queen Henrietta Maria incited enough conflict to spark civil war, as the English struggled to reconcile between the long-established image of female English domesticity and a pervasive cultural expectation for equality between marriage partners. Any form of equality in the royal marriage called the absolute power of the king into question, as it would imply that his actions had included her direct involvement, and even at times were more representative of her, not his, views. Letters captured at the Battle of Naseby confirmed fears that the queen …

Full Issue

Insights: The Newsletter of the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship

No abstract provided.

New Year's Greeting And Thanks For Your Assistance

Insights: The Newsletter of the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship

Each year, many people contribute time and resources to make it possible for the Foundation to promote research on the Book of Mormon and other ancient scripture and to publish the results of that research. Every contribution helps, whether it is a subscription, a $20 gift, or a donation of thousands of dollars, and whether it is two hours or two hundred hours of volunteer labor.

From The Boardroom

Insights: The Newsletter of the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship

Members of the F.A.R.M.S. board of directors continue to be on the move. Stephen Ricks was recently appointed to a three-year term as Associate Dean of General and Honors Education at BYU. He continues as the Chairman of the F.A.R.M.S. board of directors and as Acting President during Noel Reynolds's academic year as Scholar in Residence at the BYU Jerusalem Center. Despite the distance, Noel has been in close contact with the board, especially in making arrangements for research in the Middle East.

Nibley Repudiates Bogus Article

Insights: The Newsletter of the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship

An article with Hugh Nibley's name on it, but not written by him, has apparently been circulating in various parts of Utah and elsewhere. It is entitled "The Earth's Temporal Existence." Because Nibley and F.A.R.M.S. receive numerous inquiries about the authenticity of the article, he has allowed us to publish the following statement. In Nibley's inimitable style, it makes clear his attitude to the article and the fuss it has created.

Dead Sea Scrolls Conference

Insights: The Newsletter of the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship

Professor Norman Golb, Rev. Joseph Fitzmyer, and Professor Stephen Ricks discussed the Dead Sea Scrolls to a sold-out audience at Stanford University on November 20. A complete video of the conference, together with an interview with Hugh Nibley, is available on the order form.

Eyewitness Accounts Give Historical Background On The D&C

Insights: The Newsletter of the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship

Unlike other books of scripture, the Doctrine and Covenants contains very little historical narrative. The teachings in scripture take on added meaning as they are seen in the context of the needs and experiences of God's people at the time. For the Doctrine and Covenants, more than for the other books of scripture, we must turn to outside sources for insights from the historical background.

Complete Body Of Interviews With David Whitmer Presented And Analyzed

Insights: The Newsletter of the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship

David Whitmer was the most interviewed of the three witnesses of the Book of Mormon and the last surviving witness. His lifelong testimony, consistent in affirming the reality of his experience, is a rich resource for every student of Mormonism.

Volunteer Needed For Library Work

Insights: The Newsletter of the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship

F.A.R.M.S. could use a volunteer to help update the cataloguing and organization of the F.A.R.M.S. library and archive. Persons who could donate a few hours a week and are interested in helping with this project are invited to contact Brent Hall at the F.A.R.M.S. office.

Four Gospels Harmonized, Plus All Changes Made By Joseph Smith

Insights: The Newsletter of the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship

The four Gospels and the Joseph Smith Translation are now available in a new and innovative compilation. The Joseph Smith Translation of the Four Gospels, available on the order form, presents the four Gospels in a harmonized parallel format, with every change made by the Prophet Joseph Smith integrated into the text and highlighted. This format makes it easy to identify Joseph's changes, to compare the text of all four Gospels and the Joseph Smith Translation (JST), and to make a comprehensive study of the life and teachings of the Savior.

Vikings, Iron, And The Book Of Mormon, William J. Hamblin

Insights: The Newsletter of the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship

The question of the relationship between Mesoamerican archaeology and descriptions of the use of iron and other metals in the Book of Mormon is a complex one. The Jaredites, Nephites, and Mulekites came from the ancient Near East, where metallurgy was a widespread, integral part of civilization. There is evidence from the Book of Mormon that some elements of Near Eastern metallurgical technology were brought to the New World.

New Evidence About Book Of Mormon Scribes

Insights: The Newsletter of the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship

A copy of the original manuscript of the Book of Mormon was made by Oliver Cowdery and two other scribes. This copy is called the printer's manuscript, since it was the one normally used to set the type for the first edition. Oliver Cowdery transcribed about 85% of the copy. Most of the remainder is in the second scribe's hand, with only a few pages by the third scribe, apparently in relief for the second scribe. The third scribe has been identified as Hyrum Smith by Dean Jessee. Until now the second scribe has been unidentified, but new evidence suggests …