2011 Solomon-Tenenbaum Symposium
"On the academic study of the ancient story"
Location: TBA
13 September 2011
1:30 - 2:45 p.m.
Panelists, presentation titles, abstracts, and bibliography
Symposium Moderator: Elise Blackwell
Department of English Language & Literature, USC
Holocaust and myth: How tales help us speak
Federica K. Clementi
Department of English Language & Literature, USC
Long before Elie Wiesel famously asked “How do we remember?”, memory was a topic that ceaselessly
occupied philosophers, scientists, historians and artists. Obviously, Wiesel’s question meant to address issues
of ethics pertaining to a very specific historical memory—Shoah memory—and the way in which we can make
the witnessing act of that event meaningful today and into the future. One answer might be provided by the
ancient structures of mythos (mythical narrative). My talk briefly examines how old story-telling traditions
helped formulate “understandable” narrations of these historically all-too real experiences, and provided a
way to process and preserve Holocaust memory.
Bibliography:
Miron, Dan. 2001. The image of the shtetl and other studies of modern Jewish literary imagination. Syracuse,
NY: Syracuse University Press.
Visotzky, Burton L. 2011. Sage tales: Wisdom and wonder from the rabbis of the Talmud. Woodstock, VT:
Jewish Lights Publishing.
Ancient tales and modern Chinese thought
Michael Gibbs Hill
Department of Languages, Literatures, & Cultures, USC
China’s rich historical and literary traditions offer writers a vast reservoir of stories and tales that can shed
light on contemporary events and circumstances. My talk will engage with modern China’s most famous
writer and intellectual, Lu Xun (1881-1936), and his Old Stories Retold, a collection of haunting tales that
rework some of the most famous stories of Chinese mythology to reflect on Lu Xun’s turbulent era and his
concern for his country’s future.
Bibliography:
Lu Xun. The real story of Ah-Q and other tales of China: The complete fiction of Lu Xun. Translated by Julia
Lovell. 2009. New York: Penguin Books.
Mitter, Rana. 2008. Modern China: A very short introduction. New York: Oxford University Press.
Spence, Jonathan. 1999. The search for modern China (2nd Edition). New York: W. W. Norton.
Stories in Plato and Cicero: Narrative goes where philosophy only dreams
Paul Allen Miller
Department of Languages, Literatures, & Cultures, USC
One of the great puzzles in the interpretation of Plato is why, just after banishing the poets in Book 10 of the
Republic, Plato concludes his monumental meditation on Justice and the ideal state with the "Myth or Er."
Was this not a contradiction to introduce a poetic fiction immediately after declaring poets personae non
gratae? Yet in the ancient world this gesture was not only understood, it was emulated. Cicero at the end of
his De Republica, the Roman response to Plato's Greek text, appends the "Dream of Scipio," a clearly mythical
and metaphysical fiction, which ends what is in many ways a very down to earth discussion of the origins and
proper functioning of the Roman state. In each case a discourse that privileges rationality as a means of
ordering our collective lives ends with an avowedly mythic narrative. In this brief presentation, I will argue
that in both cases, what is understood is that the fictive and the poetic is not simply an imitative discourse, but
that it also has the capacity to go beyond reason and gesture toward the limits of thought and experience.
Bibliography:
Altman, William H. F. 2010. The truly false basis of Cicero's Platonism. The McNeese Review 48: 37-56.
Brisson, Luc. 1998. Plato the mythmaker. Translated and edited by Gerard Nadaff. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Tafsîr Isra'îliyât and Midrash: A shared tradition in Islam and Judaism
Gordon D. Newby
Department of Middle Eastern & South Asian Studies, Emory University
By the time of the rise of Islam in the early seventh century C.E., the presence of vibrant Jewish communities
in Arabia and Jewish proselytizing among the Arab population had introduced both midrashic materials and
methods into Arabian culture. When Muhammad preached about such biblical characters as Moses, Abraham
or Joseph, The non-Jewish Arabs knew these stories in a midrashic form. With the development and
expansion of Islam into the Middle East, Jewish midrashic views were used to establish Islam’s legitimacy, to
explain the Qur’an, and to attract converts. This presentation will explore the shared midrashic traditions in
Islam and Judaism.
Bibliography:
Firestone, Reuven. 1990. Journeys in holy lands: The evolution of the Abraham-Ishmael legends in Islamic
exegesis. Albany: SUNY Press.
Newby, Gordon. 1989. The making of the last prophet: A reconstruction of the earliest biography of
Muhammad. Columbia SC: University of South Carolina Press.
Wheeler, Brannon. 2002. Moses in the Quran and Islamic exegesis. London: Routledge – Curzon.
The turn from history to literature and the end of Wissenschaft des Judentums
Burton L. Visotzky
Louis Finkelstein Institute for Religious and Social Studies, Jewish Theological Seminary
The narratives of rabbinic literature were long taken to be biography or, when they were just too outlandish,
they were assumed to contain some useful “kernel of history.” Prof. Visotzky presents the shift from
historical-critical study to the literary-religious appreciation of these ancient narratives in the modern
academy.
Bibliography:
Visotzky, Burton L. 2011. Sage tales: Wisdom and wonder from the rabbis of the Talmud. Woodstock, VT:
Jewish Lights Publishing.
Visotzky, Burton L. 2008. Leaning literary, reading rabbinics. Prooftexts 28: 85-99
Visotzky, Burton L. 1992. Six studies in Midrash and methods. Shofar 10: 86-96.