Neohelicon
Volume/Issue:
Volume 38: Issue 2
World literature as alternative discourse
Author:
David Damrosch Department of Comparative Literature, Harvard University, Dana Palmer House 201, 16 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA

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Pages:
307–317
Online Publication Date:
04 Oct 2011
Publication Date:
01 Dec 2011
Article Category:
Research Article
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-011-0115-8
Keywords:
World literature; Book of Job; Cuneiform
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Abstract  

World literature is often defined in terms of the circulation of works out into languages and cultures beyond their original homeland. But it is also possible to consider an opposite mode of literary worldliness, which occurs when writers draw on foreign literatures in order to intervene within their own culture. This article takes the example of the biblical Book of Job, based on a Babylonian model which it neither imitates nor parodies (the more usual modes of relation of biblical writers to the literary productions of the larger imperial cultures around them). Instead, the poet of the Book of Job selectively draws on Babylonian tradition in order to open up a new mode of understanding of the divine amid the crisis of the Babylonian exile, neither rejecting the surrounding culture nor assimilating to it, portraying a just but unknowable God who has characteristics of a benevolent Mesopotamian tyrant.

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Cover Neohelicon
Neohelicon
Print ISSN:
0324-4652
Online ISSN:
1588-2810

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Neohelicon
Language English
Size B5
Year of
Foundation		 1973
Volumes
per Year		 1
Issues
per Year		 2
Founder Akadémiai Kiadó
Founder's
Address		 H-1117 Budapest, Hungary 1516 Budapest, PO Box 245.
Publisher Akadémiai Kiadó
Springer Nature Switzerland AG
Publisher's
Address		 H-1117 Budapest, Hungary 1516 Budapest, PO Box 245.
CH-6330 Cham, Switzerland Gewerbestrasse 11.
Responsible
Publisher		 Chief Executive Officer, Akadémiai Kiadó
ISSN 0324-4652 (Print)
ISSN 1588-2810 (Online)

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