Culture and Imperialism

A poetics of postmodernism: History, theory, fiction

Preface to Third Edition: The 'Life Death' of the Author Preface to the Second Edition Prologue: The Deaths of Paul de Man Introduction: A Prehistory of the Death of the Author 1. The Birth of the Reader: Authorship and Apotheosis From Work to Life The 'Founders of Languages' Mimesis and the Author Autobiographies 2. The Author and the Death of Man: Cogito and the Birth of Man The Founder of Futurity What (and Who) is an Author? Allegories of Misreading Transcendental Lures: LAcan and the Mastery of Language Subjectivities 3. Misread Intentions: Authors of Absence Hors-Texte A History of Silence Doubling the Text: Intention and its Other The Myth of Writing Reading and (Self-) Writing Conclusion: Critic and Author: Critic and Author? Misreceptions: Phenomenology into Deconstruction The Ghost in the Machine: Authorial Inscription and the Limits of Theory Epilogue: Technology and the Politics of Reading 'Half Dust, Half Deity': The Middle Way of Situated Authorship Appendix 1: The Biographical Imperative Appendix 2: The Author as Reader Notes Bibliography Index.

The Death and Return of the Author: Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault and Derrida

The Subject of Semiotics

A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America

Religion's great and powerful mystery fascinates us, but it also terrifies. So too the monsters that haunt the stories of the Judeo-Christian mythos and earlier traditions: Leviathan, Behemoth, dragons, and other beasts. In this unusual and provocative book, Timothy K. Beal writes about the monsters that lurk in our religious texts, and about how monsters and religion are deeply entwined. Horror and faith are inextricable. Ans as monsters are part of religious texts and traditions, so religion lurks in the modern horror genre, from its birth in Dante's Inferno to the contemporary spookiness of H.P. Lovecraft and the Hellraiser films. Religion and Its Monsters is essential reading for students of religion and popular culture, as well as any readers with an interest in horror.

Religion and Its Monsters

Theory for Religious Studies

What appears to be self-evident in biblical studies — what "can be assumed" — may in fact be quite problematic Invariably and unquestionably, scholars of Micah 1:8-9 identify its speaker as the prophet rather than YHWH Yet when one tugs at a few loose threads, that supposedly self-evident reading unravels After problematizing that identification, this paper argues for reading YHWH as the profoundly unstable speaking subject of this abjectionable dirge As such, the divine subject of this prophetic discourse is rendered entirely ambivalent, sweeping through and among the people with all the rage and all the grief of absolute disorientation Understood thus, the book of Micah opens with a theophany of, in Julia Kristeva's terms, a "subject on trial," brought about by the "fracture of a symbolic code which can no longer 'hold' its (speaking) subjects" (1986a:30) This reading, which draws inspiration from Kristeva's theories of textuality and the construction of the speaking subject in discourse, is placed in intertextual tension with Kristeva's own reading of the biblical God in The Powers of Horror (1982), which, ironically, depicts that divine subject as the stable, univocal Guarantor of patriarchal order Thus this paper is intended to problematize Kristeva's reading of the divine subject of biblical discourse, even while it depends heavily on her theoretical work to evolve a new reading of the text

The System and the Speaking Subject in the Hebrew Bible: Reading for Divine Abjection

Preface, Introduction: Dislocating Beginnings, 1. Writing Out, I, 2. Palimpsest, 3. The Bible As Moral Literature, 4. Writing Out, II, 5. Finding Oneself Signed Up, 6. Insomnia, and a Lost Dream of Writing, 7. Subversive Excesses, 8. Coming Out, In Conclusion, Notes, Bibliography, Index.

The Book of Hiding: Gender, Ethnicity, Annihilation, and Esther

After highlighting the substantial gains made by the reception historical approach, this article proceeds to point out some of its inherent limitations, particularly when applied to biblical texts. In attending to the material-aesthetic dimensions of biblical texts, media, and ideas of the Bible, especially in dialogue with anthropological, material-historical, and media-historical approaches, these limitations become acute and call for a harder cultural turn than is possible from a strictly reception-historical approach. This article proposes to move beyond reception history to cultural history, from research into how biblical texts and the Bible itself are received to how they are culturally produced as discursive objects. Such a move would involve a double turn in the focus of biblical scholarship and interpretation: from hermeneutical reception to cultural production, and from interpreting scripture via culture to interpreting culture, especially religious culture, via its productions of scripture. As such, it would bring biblical research into fuller and more significant dialogue with other fields of comparative scriptural studies, religious studies, and the academic humanities and social sciences in general.

Timothy K. Beal

Papers

Religion and Its Monsters

Theory for Religious Studies

The System and the Speaking Subject in the Hebrew Bible: Reading for Divine Abjection

The Book of Hiding: Gender, Ethnicity, Annihilation, and Esther

Reception History and Beyond: Toward the Cultural History of Scriptures