Equivalencia de fracciones Números racionales

Individual efforts to heed the call articulated by Ebel, Murison, and Kaufmann over the past decade have been multifarious, yet religion has not seen a great renaissance in literary studies outside its existence as a sequestered field. One reason may be that the subject tends to inspire personal reflections and appreciations rather than literary criticism.10 Since part of my argument will be that Melville develops a mode of theological contemplation in his writing, my first interest is in theorizing the relationship between literary and theological modes of thinking. Studies operating at this intersection are usually authored by scholars trained in theological and archival research. Stephen Prickett, the editor of the Oxford edition of the King James Bible, has written several books on the historical indebtedness of European (particularly Anglo-Saxon and German) romantic literature to the Biblical text. Prickett’s Romanticism and Religion (1976) forms an important basis for my own argument because it contradicts the simplistic binary opposition of theology and literature in both theological and literary criticism on the grounds that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century thinkers, particularly his two main characters, Wordsworth and Coleridge, did not define their work along those lines. Prickett notes that “The influence of Wordsworth and Coleridge on their successors is neither simply theological, nor simply

10 _{An example is Harold Bloom’s Where Shall Wisdom Be Found? (2005), a review of literary works}

Bloom deems inspired by Old Testament wisdom literature. To be fair, Bloom notes right off the bat that his intentions behind writing the book are motivated by a need for personal philosophical reflection rather than academic rigor. The book is a witty romp through literary history that traces somewhat loosely literary adaptations of Biblical wisdom literature. In contrast, Bloom’s thematically broader The Shadow of a Great Rock (2012) attempts a critical reading of the Bible as literature and is sensitive to most of the phobias and paranoias Western scholars face when dealing with this task (5). Studies of the former category often err on the side of literary analysis, which is where I will stake my claim in this study.

aesthetic, but in their sense of the word ‘poetic’—in other words, an indivisible union of the two” (Romanticism 6). Prickett usefully exposes the purely literary or purely theological view

academics have taken on literary romanticism by sketching a minority tradition of authors following in Wordsworth and Coleridge’s footsteps. Their idea of “poetic ‘creativity,’” Prickett argues, “[. . .] was in fact a re-discovery and a re-application of a much older Judeo-Christian way of thinking about religious experience” (Romanticism 7). Specifically, he shows how literary language vociferates the ambiguity of human experience, a process which Prickett defines as the “continuing co-existence and conflict of the natural and secular ‘outer’ world with the ‘inner’ world of religious experience, sacred and felt as supernatural” (Romanticism 7). In

Words and the Word (1988) Prickett expounds upon the idea that language, and Biblical language in particular, is a heuristic process rather than a rigid methodology. “[L]anguage,” he notes, “is not seen as something that can be created ab initio, or even defined a priori or as an essentialist methodology; it constitutes rather a collective and cultural context within which human beings come to consciousness and self-discovery” (emphasis added, Words 34). By proposing the existence of a hermeneutical tradition of poetic theological contemplation, Prickett, it seems to me, provides precisely the kind of methodology recent proponents of the resurgent debate about the interplay of theology and aesthetics demand.

Another prominent name in the research about the connection between literary studies and Biblical hermeneutics is Robert Alter, who has produced a compendious work on the Hebrew Bible and its translations, as well as some well-read analyses of Melville’s Moby-Dick. Alter’s expertise as a scholar of Hebrew is what he calls literary style; i.e., its formal linguistic features and their interplay. His companion pieces The Art of Biblical Narrative (1981) and The Art of Biblical Poetry (1985) continue to be standard texts for all who are interested in the

aesthetic and historical contextual analysis of the Bible. Alter systemizes Biblical language (tone, puns, translation) as well as thematics. More recently, he has produced his own annotated

translations of OT wisdom in The Wisdom Books (2011), upon which I rely for a critical evaluation of each book’s role within this sub-category of Christian and Hebrew text. Alter has also incrementally ventured into literary studies, most recently delivering a passionate plea for a refocusing on what he calls style in American literary studies: Pen of Iron (2010) represents one conceivable reaction to the aforementioned ongoing controversy about how to invent alternative modes to the hermeneutics of suspicion. Alter replies, in a tepid if somewhat antiquated

argument, that

What has happened too often, however, in American literary studies is that the focus on ideological considerations has tended to reduce the literary work to its

inferable propositional content, the analysis, bent on ‘unmasking’ the text, looking past the articulations of style that are compellingly interesting in their own right and that might in fact complicate the understanding of the propositional content. (emphasis added, 22)

Across these studies, Alter—while not deploying the parlance of high literary theory—has made the compelling case that language, as aesthetic effect, cannot be dismissed from human

communication. The Bible makes a strong case that whatever is to be worked out about human reality must ultimately occur in language. Melville therefore is part of a larger, literary project that seeks not merely to diagnose the fundamental failure and futility of human reason and perception in humanity’s linguistic production, but rather conceives of failure and deadlock in communication within language as part of a system of perpetual learning. Language is not an inescapable trap but an unwieldy medium of heuristic character, the mastery of which requires patience, intelligence, and courage. Negotiation and exploration are practical realities of engaging this medium.