Interface of Orality & Writing
Speaking, Seeing, Writing in the Shaping of New Genres
Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament, No. 260
Edited By Annette Weissenrieder & Robert B Coote
September 2010
Mohr Siebeck
Distributed by
ISBN: 9783161504457
450 pages
$257.50 Hardcover
How did the visual, the oral, and the written interrelate in antiquity? The essays in this collection address the competing and complementary roles of visual media, forms of memory, oral performance, and literacy and popular culture in the ancient Mediterranean world. Incorporating both customary and innovative perspectives, the essays advance the frontiers of our understanding of the nature of ancient texts as regards audibility and performance, the vital importance of the visual in the comprehension of texts, and basic concepts of communication, particularly the need to account for disjunctive and non-reciprocal social relations in communication. Thus the contributions show how the investigation of the interface of the oral and written, across the spectrum of seeing, hearing, and writing, generates new concepts of media and mediation.
Survey of contents:
I. Introduction The Interface of the Orality and Writing Hearing, Seeing, Writing in New GenresSusan Niditch: Hebrew Bible and Oral Literature: Misconceptions and New Directions – Teun Tieleman: Orality and Writing in Ancient Philosophy: Their Interrelationship and the Shaping of Literary Forms – Catherine Hezser: From Oral Conversations to Written Texts: Randomness in the Transmission of Rabbinic Traditions – Antoinette Clark Wire: Mark: News as Tradition – Werner Kelber: The History of the Closure of Biblical Texts
II The Interface of the Orality and Writing Hearing in New Genres
John Foley: Plenitude and Diversity: Interactions between Orality and Writing – Kristina Dronsch: Transmissions from Scripturality to Orality: Hearing the Voice of Jesus in Mark 4:1–34 – Ruben Zimmermann: Memory and Form Criticism: The Typicality of Memory as a Bridge between Orality and Literality in the Early Christian Remembering Process – Richard Horsley: The Gospel of Mark in the Interface of Orality and Writing – David Rhoads: Performance Events in Early Christianity: New Testament Writings in an Oral Context – David Trobisch: Performance Criticism as an Exegetical Method: A Story, Three Insights, and Two Jokes
III. The Interface of the Orality and Writing Seeing in New Genres
Kristina Dronsch/Annette Weissenrieder: A Theory of the Message for New Testament Writings or Communicating the Words of Jesus: From Angelos to Euangelion – David Balch: Women Prophets/Maenads Visually Represented in Two Roman Colonies: Pompeii and Corinth – Annette Weissenrieder: The Didactics of Images: The Fig-Tree in Mark 11:12−14 and 20−21
IV. The Interface of the Orality and Writing Writing in New Genres
Annette Schellenberg: A “lying pen of the scribes” (Jer 8:8)? Orality and Writing in the Formation of Prophetic Books – Roger Nam:Writing Songs, Singing Songs: The Oral and the Written in the Commission of the Levitical Singers (1 Chr 25:1−6) – Andreas Schuele: “Call on me in the day of trouble […]” From Oral Lament to Lament Psalms – Pieter J.J. Botha: “Publishing” a Gospel: Notes on Historical Constraints to Gospel Criticism – Daniel Boyarin: The Sovereignty of the Son of Man: Reading Mark – Robert Coote: Scripture and the Writer of Mark – Holly Hearon: Mapping Written and Spoken Word in the Gospel of Mark – Trevor Thompson: Writing in Character: Claudius Lysias to Felix as a Double-Pseudepigraphon (Acts 23:26–30)
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