Sessions
Berlin 2017
Call for Papers
Analyzing the Metatextuality of the Biblical Tradition Literature: The Authority of Narrating Contexts
Because biblical texts emerged as parts of ancient discourses and were transmitted as such the 2017 workshop will be based on a discourse analytical approach to the literary history. It follows the current discourse linguistics with its basis in the views of M. Foucault (with regard to its use see Heckl, Neuanfang und Kontinuität, FAT 104, Tübingen 2016, 6-26).
The panel invites contributors to discuss exemplary texts in which hermeneutical strategies show how the biblical authors tried to persuade their readers to accept their new texts instead of their prestages (Vorlagen). In this first panel of the research unit the focus will be on the question of the authority of narrating contexts, on how texts were given authority against their literary Vorlagen. Examples are attempts to establish the fiction of a particular origin (for instance the alleged author in early pseudepigraphical notes) or to show the superiority of the text against its Vorlagen. Such hermeneutical strategies are accessible because each and every text contains presuppositions to the intended readers. Via these presuppositions it is possible to determine the discourses to which the biblical texts originally belonged. The testimony of texts to which parallel traditions exist (esp. the books of the Chronicles and the books of Samuel and Kings) enables us to understand the specific connections between the hermeneutical strategies and the literary transformations which were their results.
There will be two sessions: one session specifically dealing with metatexuality in narrating contexts and another joint session with the workshop “Metacriticism: On Methodological Problems of Biblical Exegesis”. While the aim of that workshop is a metacriticism from within the classical Source- and Redaction Criticism, the joint session together with the metatextuality workshop and its discourse analytical approach will be an opportunity to reevaluate the models of the emergence of the biblical texts which are mostly undiscussed in the current diachronic analyses of biblical texts.