Defamiliarizing the popular image of the bible in some contemporary rewritings in english

IF 0.3 2区文学 0 LANGUAGE & LINGUISTICS

JOURNAL OF LITERARY SEMANTICS Pub Date : 2018-04-01 DOI:10.1515/JLS-2018-0001

Ewa Rychter

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引用次数: 0

Abstract

Abstract This paper focuses on the ways some recent British and Irish rewritings of the Bible estrange what has become the publicly accepted and dominant image of the biblical text. Recently, the Bible has been given the status of “home scripture” (Sherwood, Yvonne. 2012. Biblical Blaspheming: Trials of the Sacred for a Secular Age. Cambridge: CUP) and become a domesticated and conservative text, a rather placid cultural/literary monument, an important foundation of democracy, a venerable religious document judged more tolerant and liberal than other scriptures. Though the Bible used to be perceived as an explosive text, peppered with potentially offensive passages, today its enmity is neutralised either by linking the Bible with ancient times or by relating it to people’s religious beliefs and by entrenching its more scandalous parts within the discourse of tolerance. It is such an anodyne image of the Bible that the biblical rewritings of Roberts, Winterson, Barnes, Crace, Pullman, Tóibin, Alderman, Diski defamiliarize. By showing biblical events through the eyes of various non-standard focalizers, those novels disrupt the formulaic patterns of the contemporary perception of the Bible. It is through these strange perspectives that we observe the critical moment when the overall meaning and the role of the biblical text is established and the biblical story is actually written down. Importantly, it is also the moment when somebody moulds the scripture according to their ideas and glosses over all the complexities, violence and immorality related to the events the biblical text describes. Also, contemporary biblical rewritings defamiliarize the currently popular image of the Bible – that of a whitewashed text which inculcates morality, conserves social order and teaches love and tolerance, by employing images of disintegration, dirt and contagion as well as by constructing a figure of a fervent believer in the Bible and its ideas.

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在一些当代英语重写中，使圣经的流行形象变得陌生

摘要本文主要探讨英国和爱尔兰近来对圣经的一些改写，是如何疏远已成为公众接受和主导的圣经文本形象的。最近，《圣经》被赋予了“家庭经文”的地位(Sherwood, Yvonne. 2012)。圣经的亵渎:世俗时代的神圣审判。剑桥:CUP)，并成为一个驯化和保守的文本，一个相当平静的文化/文学纪念碑，一个重要的民主基础，一个受人尊敬的宗教文件被认为比其他经文更宽容和自由。虽然《圣经》曾经被认为是一部爆炸性的文本，充斥着潜在的攻击性段落，但今天，通过将《圣经》与古代联系起来，或将其与人们的宗教信仰联系起来，以及在宽容的话语中巩固其更可耻的部分，它的敌意被中和了。这是一幅如此平淡无奇的《圣经》形象，以至于罗伯茨、温特森、巴恩斯、格雷斯、普尔曼、Tóibin、奥德曼、迪斯基等人对《圣经》的改写都感到陌生。这些小说通过不同的非标准聚焦者的视角来展示圣经事件，打破了当时人们对圣经的刻板印象。正是通过这些奇怪的视角，我们观察到了圣经文本的整体意义和角色确立的关键时刻，圣经故事实际上被写了下来。重要的是，这也是一些人根据自己的想法塑造经文的时刻，掩盖了所有与圣经文本描述的事件相关的复杂性，暴力和不道德。此外，当代圣经的重写使目前流行的圣经形象变得陌生- - -通过使用解体、肮脏和传染的图像，以及通过构建一个圣经及其思想的狂热信徒的形象，一个粉饰过的文本，灌输道德，维护社会秩序，教导爱和宽容。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

JOURNAL OF LITERARY SEMANTICS Multiple-

CiteScore

0.90

自引率

10.00%

发文量

期刊介绍： The aim of the Journal of Literary Semantics is to concentrate the endeavours of theoretical linguistics upon those texts traditionally classed as ‘literary’, in the belief that such texts are a central, not a peripheral, concern of linguistics. This journal, founded by Trevor Eaton in 1972 and edited by him for thirty years, has pioneered and encouraged research into the relations between linguistics and literature. It is widely read by theoretical and applied linguists, narratologists, poeticians, philosophers and psycholinguists. JLS publishes articles on all aspects of literary semantics. The ambit is inclusive rather than doctrinaire.