When Mieke Bal reread the story of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife as an
adult, she was struck by differences between her childhood memories of
a moral tale and what she read today. In Loving Yusuf¸ Bal seeks to
resolve this clash between memory and text, using the same story, in
which Joseph spurns the advance of his master’s wife who then
falsely accuses him of rape, as her point of departure. She juxtaposes
the Genesis tale to the rather different version told in the Qur’an
and the depictions of it by Rembrandt and explores how Thomas Mann’s
great retelling in Joseph and His Brothers reworks these versions.
Through this inquiry she develops concepts for the analysis of texts
that are both strange and overly familiar—culturally remote yet
constantly retold. As she puts personal memories in dialogue with
scholarly exegesis, Bal asks how all of these different versions
complicate her own and others’ experience of the story, and how the
different truths of these texts in their respective traditions
illuminate the process of canonization.
Les mer
Conceptual Travels from Present to Past
Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9780226035888
Publisert
2018
Utgave
1. utgave
Utgiver
Vendor
University of Chicago Press
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Digital bok
Forfatter