Sacred History and the Beginnings of Prose Fiction
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4376249 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Robert Alter (corresponding author) |
| Year | 1980 |
| Volume | 1 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 143 |
| Publication date | 1980-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Poetics Today (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0333-5372 • E-ISSN: 1527-5507 |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/1772416 |
| OpenAlex | W2316832417 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 4 |
| References cited | 1 |
The Hebrew Bible is generally perceived, with considerable justice, as sacred history, and both terms of that status have often been invoked to argue against the applicability to the Bible of the methods of literary analysis. If the text is sacred, if it was grasped by the audiences for whom it was made as a revelation of God's will, perhaps of His literal words, how can one hope to explain it through categories developed for the understanding of such a fundamentally secular, individual, and aesthetic enterprise as that of later Western literature?-And if the text is history, seriously purporting to render an account of the origins of things and of Israelite national experience as they actually happened, is it not presumptuous to analyze these narratives in the terms we customarily apply to prose fiction, a mode of writing we understand to be the arbitrary invention of the writer, whatever the correspondences it may exhibit with quotidian or even historical reality? In a novel by Flaubert or Tolstoy or Henry James, where we are aware of the conscious fashioning of a fictional artifice, sometimes with abundant documentation from the writer's notebooks and letters, it is altogether appropriate to discuss techniques of characterization, shifts of dialogue, the ordering of larger compositional elements, but are we not coercing the Bible into being literature by attempting to transfer such categories to a set of texts that are theologically motivated, historically oriented, and perhaps to some extent collectively composed? At least some of these objections will be undercut by recognizing, as several recent analysts have argued, that history is far more intimately related to fiction than we have been accustomed to assume. It is important to see the common ground shared by the two modes of narrative, ontologically and formally, but it
Art · Literature · Biblical Studies and Interpretation · History · Philosophy
| Unique citing works | 4 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,1 |
| Citation span | 1984 - 2022 (39) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |