Performance Criticism, Cognition, and Embodiment
A Dialog between Performance Criticism, Cognitive Linguistics, and Islands, Islanders, and Scripture
Papers given at SBL 2023 in San Antonio
The human body is a significant link between ancient and modern performances of biblical traditions. Across time and cultures, readers, lectors, and performers of biblical texts gesture and use other signals with eyes, face, hands, arms, and legs that audiences blend with the sounds they hear to make meaning. In this joint session co-sponsored by Performance Criticism of the Bible and Other Ancient Texts, Cognitive Linguistics in Biblical Interpretation, and the Islands, Islanders, and Scriptures, three invited papers will explore how the human body and embodied cognition may provide a basis for comparing ancient and modern performances.
Click on the links below to watch the presentations on Vimeo:
Peter S. Perry, A Performance Criticism Point of View on Performance and Embodiment
Beth Currier, A Cognitive Linguistics Point of View on Performance and Embodiment
Althea Spencer-Miller, An Islander Point of View on Performance and Embodiment
Using Dance to Perform John 5:1-9
by Eric Fong
Filmed at Yale Divinity School, Nov 2023.
Jan Assmann (1938-2024)
From https://www.memorystudiesassociation.org:
The field of memory studies has lost a charismatic founding figure. Jan Assmann died on Monday 19 February 2024. He was 85.
Jan Assmann’s landmark study of cultural memory, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, was published in 1992 and immediately welcomed across German academia as a new ‘paradigm’ of studying culture. The book has been translated into many languages including Italian (1997); Hungarian (2000), Turkish (2001), Arabic (2003), Russian (2004), Polish (2008), and French (2010) and helped establish memory studies as an interdisciplinary and transnational field of study. It took almost twenty years for the book to be translated into English (2011, Cultural Memory and Early Civilization). Until then, anglophone readers relied on Assmann’s short essay “Cultural Memory and Collective Identity” (1995, New German Critique) for an introduction to a pathbreaking theory of cultural memory, which he had developed together with his wife Aleida Assmann and a group of Heidelberg-based scholars during the 1980s.
Read the full article appreciating Jan Assmann at https://www.memorystudiesassociation.org/in-memoriam-jan-assmann-1938-2024/
Gospel Media
Reading, Writing, and Circulating Jesus Traditions
(Eerdmans, 2024)
New Testament scholars have often relied on outdated assumptions for understanding the composition and circulation of the gospels. This scholarship has spread myths or misconceptions about how the ancients read, wrote, and published texts. Nicholas Elder updates our knowledge of the gospels’ media contexts in this myth-busting academic study. Carefully combing through Greco-Roman primary sources, he exposes what we take for granted about ancient reading cultures and offers new and better ways to understand the gospels. These myths include claims that ancients never read silently and that the canonical gospels were all the same type of text. Elder then sheds light on how early Christian communities used the gospels in diverse ways. Scholars of the gospels and classics alike will find Gospel Media an essential companion in understanding ancient media cultures.
Performing Philemon: Possibilities and Limitations
Nov 20, 2023 at SBL in San Antonio, TX
This session of Performance Criticism of the Bible and Other Ancient Texts (PC-BOAT) experienced three different embodiments of Paul's letter to Philemon and asking respondents to reflect on how performance illuminates the possibilities and limitations of meaning making for an audience. Click on the links below to watch video of each performance and response.
Clifford Barbarick, Abilene Christian University, Presiding
Performances of Philemon by:
Michael Halcomb, Glossa House Publishing
Jeanette Mathews, Charles Sturt University
Marlon Winedt, United Bible Societies
Response and Discussion of Performances of Philemon:
Amy Erickson, Charles Sturt University
Shola Adegbite, Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York
Pieter Botha, University of South Africa
Nathan Esala, Capital University
Discussion