Postmodernism in Biblical Studies is characterised by proliferation of methodological and ideological interpretive perspectives, emphasis upon the ethics of interpretation and awareness of the role of interpretive communities. Following Stephen E. Fowl, the underlying motives of interpreters can be understood when approaches are analysed in terms of interpretive interests. The work of David J. A. Clines, J. Cheryl Exum and Stephen D. Moore reveals a strong de-confessional motive and a desire to exclude confessional concerns from academic interpretation. This position is ideologically driven and, in terms of liberal academic values, self-contradictory. The difficulties posed for Christian interpretation by the postmodern context are evident in the narrative criticism of Mark Allan Powell and R. Alan Culpepper, where unresolved conflict of theological, methodological and political interests threatens the coherence of the approach. Recent work by Powell addresses postmodern concerns, but fails adequately to engage theoretical and theological issues.
A postmodern understanding of the Bible as Christian scripture which affirms both the validity and legitimacy of multiple interpretive perspectives and a pneumatological understanding of the Bible as the Word of God can be framed using the work of Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Stephen E. Fowl, Roman Jakobson and Daniel Patte. Socio-pragmatic objections to the legitimacy and validity of Christian interpretation beyond the faith community can be resisted by asserting a dialogical relationship between the Bible, the church and the wider academic community, and by following Francis Watson’s argument that the church’s discourse is derived from that of the wider society in which it exists. Christian interpretation will seek to engage constructively with other interpretive approaches. A Christian ethics of interpretation characterised by openness, humility, repentance and forgiveness offers a positive contribution to the culture of postmodern academic interpretation. Jesus’ encounter with the Syrophoenician woman in Mark 7 offers a paradigm for such interpretive practice.

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Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film

Talking with strangers: towards a Christian, postmodern, academic model for biblical interpretation

‘We should have done well, I think, to be satisfied with the aspect of peace’, Virginia Woolf wrote from Richmond on 12 November 1918, describing the grey, wet day that met the armistice of World War I with weary solemnity. Arriving in London, however, the euphoria of the loud and drunken crowds carousing in the rain struck her as nervy and strained. ‘There was no centre, no form for all this wandering emotion to take’, she noted, ‘in everyone’s mind the same restlessness and inability to settle down, & yet discontent with whatever it was possible to do.’ For those who had survived the conflict, jubilation would quickly give way to a growing sense of dislocation and indeterminacy. The confident Edwardian world that had approached war in 1914 had by now dissolved into myth, and, surveying its ruins, modern society faced a crisis of belief and identity. The disintegration of nineteenth-century assumptions of progress, order and the stability of self and nationhood had, of course, been heralded well before. In the years immediately prior to the conflict, the avant-garde movements of Futurism, Imagism and Vorticism were vociferous in proclaiming their determined dissociation from the past, condemning the enervating effect of bourgeois tradition and rejecting historical consciousness for the immediacy of the modern. Recalling the creative energy of the London literary scene of the time in his memoir Return to Yesterday , for example, Ford Madox Ford depicts the young artist ‘D.Z.’ (a caricature of Wyndham Lewis), exultingly announcing to the older writer: ‘Finished! Exploded! Done for! Blasted in fact.’

Trauma and war memory

As both a fiction writer and a computer scientist, I want the interactive stories I create to be meaningfully interactive: choices should matter. To avoid laborious hand-authoring of variations, procedural content generation (PCG) seems appealing; but PCG has been less successful in producing compelling narrative text than in other realms. To address this problem, I consider the minimum amount of PCG that might make a human-authored story computationally interesting but still authorially sound. The resulting research prototype generates "satellite" sentences (which moderate pacing and reestablish context within dialogue scenes) within otherwise hand-authored scenes in a complete interactive story.

http://almostgoodbye.textories.com/almostgoodbye-paper.pdf

Sharing Authoring with Algorithms: Procedural Generation of Satellite Sentences in Text-based Interactive Stories

/pdf/peut-on-parler-de-narrativite-en-musique-479im65bzs.pdf

Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film

Citations

Talking with strangers: towards a Christian, postmodern, academic model for biblical interpretation

Trauma and war memory

Sharing Authoring with Algorithms: Procedural Generation of Satellite Sentences in Text-based Interactive Stories

« Peut-on parler de narrativité en musique? »

Using the past to serve the present : historical narratives as a foreign policy tool, the case of China in Africa

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