Poetics for the Gospels? Rethinking Narrative Criticism

Poetics for the Gospels? Rethinking Narrative Criticism. by dint of Petri Merenlahti. Studies of the novel Testament and Its World. London: T & T Clark, 2002 xi + 174 pp $4995

Poetics for the Gospels? Rethinking Narrative Criticism is part of the fruit from a six-year research shoot forward "The Gospels as Stories" (1994-1999) by the agency of the Department of Biblical Studies at the University of Helsinki. In the series of critical essays within this volume Petri Merenlahti surveys and evaluates the history and practice of narrative criticism, and he suggests a more critical and comprehensive program of historical poetics.

The essays are clustered into three sections. Part 1 consists of three chapters that trace the origins and nature of narrative criticism, demonstrate the historical contingency of the conceptions of literary meaning and value, examine the effects of historical contingency for practical analysis, and display the inescapable ideological nature of the biblical true copy and how narrative-critical readings of the christian religions have necessarily interpreted and evaluated the narratives' values and beliefs and rejoined to them with action in the not away Having established the indissoluble relationship between textual features and ideology in the the cross texts, part 2 examines the nature of this relationship. The three chapters in this section explicate the composite relationship among text, history, and ideology through means of practical analysis beneath the three classical loci of narrative theory, namely narrative rhetoric, characterization, and piece of ground In light of the demonstration in the first sum of two units parts of the book that the formal features of the christianitys texts are not to be dissociated from their ideological and historically particular cultural aspects, part 3 relocates poetics as part of a broader interpretive framework.

The chapter upon the history and origins of narrative criticism yields not sole an informative history lesson, on the other hand also several significant insights. upon the one hand, Merenlahti argues that literary interpretation of the divine revelations may as easily yield unity as diversity and fragmentariness. Moreover, one as well as the other unity and fragmentariness as literary values are particular and historical, not universal and timeless. upon the other hand, he displays that both the historical standard of the evangelists' time and the evangelists' have aims required a degree of unity. Furthermore, the evangelists were not primarily engaging in an aesthetic enterprise on the other hand were promoting "an ideologically viable interpretation of an essentially historical message that was to be preserv in an authentic form" (p 31) single consequence for practical analysis is that interpretation must take into account the historical particularity of the body and the reader. Chapter 3 "Why do novel Readers value Mark?" is a particularly powerful example of the historically conditioned nature of the reception and (re)evaluation of a body In addition, chapter 4 helpfully illustrates that the implied readers of the divine revelations are thoroughly ideological beings, and thus narrative criticism's desire to assume the implied reader's position and point of view leads it back to ideology. Another noteworthy conclusion from its analysis of the implied reader of the christian religions and Acts is that "Christian social experience and identity become necessary preconditions for understanding the narrative" (p 54) I find the above points persuasive and helpful, allowing to differing degrees.

The practical analysis of the relationship between textual features and ideology in the the crosss in Part 2 is also enlightening. Chapter 5 provides helpful categories for understanding and interpreting "gaps" (omissions of relevant information), "blanks" (omissions of irrelevant information), intentional and unintentional ambiguities, and the limits upon ambiguity imposed by the ideological aims of the christianity Just as significant is the insight that the marriage of poetics and ideology is the source of the pair unity and diversity in the christianity narrative. Ideology, since it gripe [i]or[/i] grips diverse elements and patterns together and turn rounds narrative into a commentary, simultaneously provides unity and coherence as well as fragmentation and dissonance to the narrative. The analysis of characterization in chapter 6 is also useful. The stage to which characters stand on the outside as individual personalities or nothing else but functional agents depends on by what means "each character relates to the ideology of each christianity and to the ideology of its readers" (p 97) Chapter 7 likewise sheds a certain number of light on the plot of the christianitys All follow a pattern of concealment and disclosure, moving towards the final recognition of the initially incomprehensible identity of Jesus, with differing emphasis upon concealment or disclosure in each individual christianity narrative (p. 109).

Part 3 while providing an insightful evaluation of rife interest in integrated approaches (in particular D Rhoads's "Narrative Criticism: Practices and Prospects"; K Syreeni's mould of three worlds; and V Robbins's socio-rhetorical approach), advances a certain number of proposals that are more debatable in my opinion. As Merenlahti argues, Syreeni's and Robbins's patterns do imply a paradigm shift towards a broader integration of body history, and ideology-whether or not they are judg prosperous as formulations of a fresh paradigm. While I agree that the body itself is rooted in a particular space and time with its material, social, and cultural conditions and that interpretation is a secondary description and assessment that is itself historically conditioned, it does not appear to be to follow that "[a]t a certain number of fundamental level, descriptive models are not thus much descriptive as they are metaphoric" (p 130) While Merenlahti explicitly throw asides radical skepticism, I fail to diocese the basis upon which he is able to affirm that interpretive moulds are not empty of all descriptive power. Moreover, it appears dubious to apply psychoanalytic criticism as instrumental metaphors when they are considered deliberate interpretive fictions that are nothing other but metaphoric.