Description
Book Synopsis"Textuality, Culture, and Scripture", a study of the necessary and close relations between the three concepts, describes the prominent role of texts and textuality in Western modernity and the exchange of textual for material understandings of culture that becomes apparent in the middle of the twentieth century. Taking its starting point in the turn or return in cultural studies to textuality, the argument addresses the necessary role of texts and textuality in cultural, group, and personal identities. Central to the argument is the thesis that “scripture,” rather than an occasional or optional textual category, should be seen as playing a necessary role in an adequate textual theory.
Trade Review“Textuality, Culture, and Scripture integrates and extends Wesley Kort’s scholarly project of formulating a program in the literary study of religion that is at once resonant with and critical of late modernity. On display per usual are Kort’s special combination of theoretical sophistication and close textual reading, in the service here of what is his most impressive statement to date of the innate multivalence of the idea of the ‘text’ and the consequent intersectionality of ‘the sacred’ and ‘the secular.’”
—Richard A. Rosengarten, Associate Professor of Religion and Literature, University of Chicago Divinity School, USA
Table of ContentsIntroduction; 1. The Rise of a Materialist Culture; 2. Culture and Textuality; 3. “Scripture” as a Necessary Category in an Adequate Textual Theory; 4. “Scripture” and the Bible; 5. Reading the Bible as “Scripture”; Conclusion; Index.
