Undergraduates need to fill out a permit form and receive the approval of the Graduate Chair, their advisor, and the professor for all 500-level courses.
In this course, we will be reading the bible both in the light of recent theoretical writing about it (including texts by Jacques Derrida and Mieka Bal) and of its historical making and remaking as a book (or books). Among the topics we will be discussing will be the relation between the Jewish and Christian bibles; icons and iconoclasm; Genesis from the fourteenth-century Holkham Bible to Charles Darwin; the politics and poetics of translation; the Song of Songs and English love poetry; the poetics of incarnation; William Langland, Ann Askew, Mary Rowlandson and biblical citation; and the politics of interpretation.