Playing the Texts

The Bible in Intertextual Readings

George Aichele, series editor

This series will serve as a companion and supplement to the Sheffield Academic Press Interventions series. It will compete with the Literary Currents series formerly published by Westminster/John Knox, as well as the Semeia Supplements series published by Scholars Press and the Biblical Interpretation supplements now being published by Brill. This series will "piggyback" on the Sheffield Interventions series; like Interventions, the general approach of the series will be postmodern and poststructuralist, featuring explicit grappling with ideological or theological dimensions of reading and textuality usually suppressed by more traditional "scientific" scholarly approaches. Unlike Interventions, the series will assume a reader who has already been introduced to these methodologies.

Target Readership:

The readers of this series will be expected to have introductory acquaintance with biblical studies and general familiarity with literary theory. Books in the series will be directed toward scholars and graduate-level students (including seminarians and clergy), although the books will also be of use to advanced undergraduates and theologically sophisticated laypersons. However, because of the multidisciplinary approaches which they will feature, these books will not presume highly specialized background in any single area.

Goals of the Individual Books:

There is a great need for recognizable "sites" to which students and scholars who wish to explore further the relevance of postmodern thought to biblical studies might turn, to further identify their own views, to find others of like mind, etc. This series would provide an identifiable venue for these new "voices" and new approaches.

Although there are overlapping family resemblances among postmodern thinkers, postmodernism is not a unitary, readily-identifiable group or movement. There are many postmodernisms, and many of them are still quite fluid and difficult to define, but despite this diversity, each combines theoretical experimentation and specific attention to texts in ways that are both pragmatic and often risky. The discourse of postmodern is understood here to be intensely self-reflective (ie, self-critical, methodologically self-conscious), and localized (ie, suspicious of all universals and totalizations). According to postmodernism, all thought, and hence all reading, is engaged (ideological); what is necessary is that we admit our engagements.

One great difficulty in books of this sort is to find the right balance, and the right blend, between on the one hand discussion of theory and methodology, and specific readings of texts on the other. One often gets either lots of theory with little actual discussion of texts, or else extensive analysis and commentary that is theoretically unreflective or shallow. Sometimes also the two elements (theory and reading) are not clearly related. One important criterion for manuscripts to be included in the series would be solid combination (and integration) of these two ingredients, although the proper balance and blend might vary from book to book, according to the topic.

A second criterion would draw heavily on the pervasive postmodern theme of intertextuality (Kristeva). Reading is always intertextual, as are the reading self and the community of readers. Postmodern reading makes this intertextuality explicit. Books in the series would feature more-or-less close readings of specific texts (using the word "text" rather broadly), in dialogue/tension with other texts. These readings would be, once again, local and provisional, highly contextualized, and ideologically explicit. The value of this approach would be twofold. First, each book would model an innovative method of reading, with enough explicit theoretical reflection that the reader could then apply the method to other texts. The reading would in effect illustrate the theory. Second, the book would provide an innovative and illuminating reading of one or more biblical texts, and thus it would also be of interest to students primarily interested in those texts.

Series Values:

One plays the biblical texts as one plays a fish, or puts on a play or plays a character, or as one plays a musical instrument (or better yet, plays a score, each performer playing it slightly differently), or as one plays a game, or plays with one's food. Textual play is also sexual play, and it is the play between parts of a machine. Postmodernism is very much about play in all these senses of the word; here the interest is in intertextual play, or the play between texts. As a kind of free play, this play breaks out of formerly well-established rules, and it may eventually settle down to new rules, but that hasn't happened yet. In the meantime, play is all that we have, and it is how we seek to resolve the ambiguities and tensions of our condition. It is not trivial, and much is at stake.

The series is predicated on the assumption that what biblical studies (and indeed the entire scholarly world) is now going through is not so much a paradigm-shift as it is the break-up of a dominant paradigm, that of historical criticism. If Thomas Kuhn is correct, this will eventually lead to a new paradigm; however, what this will be is presently far from clear. I would not attempt to predict what biblical studies will look like 25 years from now. Nonetheless, postmodernism is both more and less than a paradigm-shift. Less, because the postmodern is always-already "present" in the modern (Lyotard, and to a certain extent Jameson). More, because the postmodern also involves a shift in the fabric of civilization itself, a metamorphosis of beliefs and values comparable perhaps to the Renaissance. This shift is unavoidable, and it is already having great impact on scholarship of all sorts.

Postmodernism rejects the myth of objective or neutral truth, and replaces that with an understanding of truth as constructed or negotiated. Truth is provisional, local, created, and inter-subjective. Truth is political (in the broadest sense of the term), an expression of "will to power" (Nietzsche). In the contemporary world, this raises the specter (which opponents of postmodernism eagerly exploit) of truth as totally relativistic or nonexistent, truth as the right of the strong to crush the weak, truth as the success of advertisers or politicians in getting the masses to believe and do whatever they want. What is needed is a channel through which postmodern responses to these charges can be presented. Perhaps this series could also be instrumental in augmenting/creating a postmodern community, although one must expect that the very meaning of "community" will change within postmodern frames.

Format/Media:

Because these books would be exploratory, I would expect them to be relatively short, but considerable leeway has to be allowed for experimentation both in style and methodology and also in medium. Formal experimentation would be encouraged, not only in traditional book format (eg, Derrida's quasi-Talmudic multiple texts or Barthes's later aphoristic style) but also in alternative media: books on diskette, CD ROM, or the World Wide Web. Publishing on diskette or online does not automatically require that the book be made freely available. Since authors could be requested to submit copy on disk or via Internet, refereeing, editing, and production processes could be managed both more quickly and cheaply.

What would also be extremely interesting (if it could be worked out) would be books which are in effect in dialogue with each other: two or more books written at the same time, and perhaps about the same texts, by scholars using different approaches, but sharing their ideas and their drafts with each other along the way. Extensive use of the Internet would be especially valuable for this sort of dialogue.

Contributors would be those a) who have new things to say on these topics and b) whose approaches to biblical texts complement or further develop approaches introduced in the Interventions series. Particular attention would be paid to genuinely marginal voices not now being heard in the biblical studies mainstream. This attention would seek out those who explore creative and sometimes risky juxtapositions of texts, or the application of techniques previously untried in biblical studies.

Continuum/T&T Clark Style Guide

Books in the Series:

Contact:

Send inquiries or proposals to gcaichele@comcast.net