Book of Job

[Gwaimir Windgem]

What's his answer?

[GrayMouser]

Basically he leans toward Aristotle's catharsis for the audience, with heavy emphasis on the purgative sense of the word, flavoured with our post-Romantic view that the emotions are good:

"...at the level of initial arousal even terror is fun, as everyone who has been on a fairground ride knows perfectly well. Can we not, in the face of this obvious truth, cut short our grand theorising and say simply, 'Pity and fear are fun'?"

It's mostly a quick tour from Aristotle to Sydney to Freud to Nietszche and his inheritors, with a final chapter on King Lear. (It was originally written for the Northcliffe Lectures on Literature )

In the section on Freud he (approvingly) quotes a couple of good smackdowns from C.S. Lewis.

My favorite section was on Nietszche and the modern proponents of the "Dionysian" theory of Greek tragedy as sacred performance. After laying out their ideas he comes out with the pointed comment that Aristotle, who after all went to the plays, didn't seem to regard them as particularly religious.

As well, he (gently) mocks the assumption of those swept up by the Dark Side of the Apollo/Dionysus split that, "while anyone can see Gibbon's Romans are lightly-disguised 18th-century gentlemen, and Tennyson's Medievals are Victorian bourgeoisie, Nietszche's Greeks are real Greeks."

That brought blushes to my cheeks with 35-year-old memories of my own nietszchean infatuation.

Very good style too- he can deal with all the intricacies of modern Theory
without being swept up in it. I'd like to read some of his other stuff.

From the (London) Times obit:

Among the books and articles he produced there were A Common Sky (1974), which explored the relations between literature and doubt about the external world in Locke, Hume, Sterne, Wordsworth, Sartre and others; a study of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1978), which presented murder as a philosophical experiment; Overheard by God (1980), which asked how far God may be the subject of literature, and A New Mimesis (1983), which trenchantly defended the study of literature as the representation of reality, again with special reference to Shakespeare and the complexity and depth of Shakespeare’s understanding of character and history, written against formalism, but attempting to make use of the insights of structuralism.

All his adult life he moved in a vast agnostic ellipse having Christianity and atheism as its foci, whose effects may be seen in Two Concepts of Allegory, which is haunted by the doctrine of the Incarnation, in Overheard by God, and in his last book from Sussex, a study of Pope’s Essay on Man(1984) in which, in company with Dr Johnson, he condemned 18th-century theodicy.

At Oxford his writing was more strictly literary, as in Openings(1992), which is actually about the openings of works of literature, and Why Does Tragedy give Pleasure? (1998). His wider scope reappeared in The Alternative Trinity (1998), which is partly about the relations between God the Father and God the Son from Marlowe to Blake, and partly about the morality of acquiring knowledge. From the latter theme he went back to the problems of his career before he ever began to write, in Dead From the Waist Down (2003), a study of the psychology and ideals of scholarship in literature and reality (George Eliot’s Casaubon, the historic Isaac Casaubon, Mark Pattison and A. E. Housman), dedicated “To Oxford”.

[Gwaimir Windgem]

Sounds intriguing...I'll have to give a look. I'm especially eager to see the Lear connection.

[Comic Book Guy]

First, to describe the process as plagiarism is a raging anachronism. The concept of plagiarism implies copyright implies intellectual property implies, I would be willing to guess, the rise of the middle classes. Absolutely none of which have any bearing whatsoever on the Ancient Near East. There was no intellectual copyright. People very often attributed their works to more famous people in order to get people to read them. There was no jealous concern of "my idea."

Not really, plagiarism is loosely defined as the imitation of another's intellectual property. There's difference between copyright infringement - what you are talking about - and plagiarism.

[inked]

CBG, you err. The word you are using was not invented until 1615. See here:
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/plagiarism

[Comic Book Guy]

Irrelevant; the meaning and definition of the word still applies here.

[inked]

It is hardly irrelevant, CBG, that you apply a concept not yet 400 years old to texts ten times that in age and more.

The genuine question to be answered here is why, exactly, the imposition of "modern" standards should be made to ancient texts?

For instance, would you say that the ancient Chaldeans, Chinese, or even, Egyptians, were in error because they were non-Copernican in their understanding of the solar system? Or do you think that even though the Maya have the most accurate calendar that it should be faulted for being non-Copernican? I would think not.

Why then retrograde the concept of plagiarism when it clearly does not apply?

[Comic Book Guy]

You can get into etymology, if you like, but it's still irrelevant. The actual meaning of the word plagiarism was entirely appropriate for the context I used it in. Should I have said "The Bible's authors imitated closely the stories and myths of others"? The word plagiarism sufficed. It doesn't matter what date the word appropriated for the concept entered the lexicon; your Copernicus question doesn't apply here. That's an issue of epistemology.

Anyway, this is pointless meandering.

The study of comparative myths is something that is genuinely interesting and something that is probably somewhat neglected amongst scholarly circles. What insights can be gained to the questions of cultural replication and the mass spread of ideas?

[inked]

Yes, CBG, it is an issue of epistemology. Apparently there is yours and then every one else's. Yours, I understand, is the only correct one in your universe. But there are rumours of a multiverse about and the reality may be a bit more than you admit or can inure yourself to!

[Comic Book Guy]

Well, I wouldn't bother saying anything if I didn't think I was right about everything

So if you ever see me banging on about quantum physics, be sure to listen

[Gwaimir Windgem]

Originally Posted by Comic Book Guy

The study of comparative myths is something that is genuinely interesting and something that is probably somewhat neglected amongst scholarly circles. What insights can be gained to the questions of cultural replication and the mass spread of ideas?

Now, that IS an interesting question. On the most basic level, it points to a fluidity in theologico-mythical thought, and shows them to have been rather more amorphous in the past than they are generally considered to be today. Although a certain "eclecticism" is pretty common today, it seems to generally be quite self-conscious in its eclecticism, whereas the shifting of mythological boundaries in the past seems to have been much less so, almost immediately natural to the peoples of the time.