Grounded in the Body
A Bakhtinian Reading of Lamentations 2 from Another Perspective
In: Biblical InterpretationThe personification of Jerusalem as female in Lamentations is often the entry point for interpretive engagements with the book. Although Daughter Zion metaphorically represents the physical city, the figure is most often interpreted as a poetic means of portraying the suffering and distress of the human inhabitants of the city. Descriptions throughout are dominated by images of human suffering and degradation, and the struggle to come to terms with the trauma of military defeat and destruction. The book is, in its essence, anthropocentric. Does this mean, however, that these poems are limited only to an anthropocentric reading? Drawing on Bakhtinian dialogics, this paper explores the possibility of reading Lamentations 2 from another perspective. Taking its cue from Lamentations’ opening image of the widowed city seated (on the earth?), the discussion explores the metonymic potential of reading the embodied language of the text as a site of engagement with the other-than-human world. Through an excess of seeing, Lamentations 2 is read alongside Jer. 4:5–31as a means of retrieving the voice of another (non-human Other) in the text.
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10
O. Sigurdson, “How to Speak of the Body? Embodiment between Phenomenology and Theology,” Studia Theologica 62 (2008), pp. 25–43 (27).
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11
Ibid., p. 35.
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16
M. Holquist, Dialogism: Bakhtin and His World (London/New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 29. According to Holquist, this otherness makes us answerable. That is to say that otherness which occurs in a dialogic relationship means that we are compelled to respond to the world. While Holquist does not pursue the ecological ethics of this conclusion, evocative possibilities are opened up through the notion of answerability.
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17
P. Murphy, “Ground, Pivot, Motion: Ecofeminist Theory, Dialogics, and Literary Practice,” Hypatia 6 (1991), pp. 146–61 (149). This understanding leads to a de-objectification of nature – a recognition of being in the world not apart from it, and a recognition of diversity and interrelatedness. This interrelationship is built on the assumption of difference – of otherness. When we seek to read dialogically, the interrelationship between the human and the non-human in the text is not collapsed into a monologic absence of difference but is open to the reality of diversity, a diversity in which otherness and anotherness form the basis of the dialogic engagement.
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20
Hartmann, “Feminist and Postcolonial Perspectives on Ecocriticism,” p. 96 (citing Murphy 1995: 23).
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21
D. Rose, “Dialogue with Place: Toward an Ecological Body,” Journal of Narrative Theory 32 (2002), pp. 311–25, 392 (311).
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Grounded in the Body
A Bakhtinian Reading of Lamentations 2 from Another Perspective
In: Biblical InterpretationThe personification of Jerusalem as female in Lamentations is often the entry point for interpretive engagements with the book. Although Daughter Zion metaphorically represents the physical city, the figure is most often interpreted as a poetic means of portraying the suffering and distress of the human inhabitants of the city. Descriptions throughout are dominated by images of human suffering and degradation, and the struggle to come to terms with the trauma of military defeat and destruction. The book is, in its essence, anthropocentric. Does this mean, however, that these poems are limited only to an anthropocentric reading? Drawing on Bakhtinian dialogics, this paper explores the possibility of reading Lamentations 2 from another perspective. Taking its cue from Lamentations’ opening image of the widowed city seated (on the earth?), the discussion explores the metonymic potential of reading the embodied language of the text as a site of engagement with the other-than-human world. Through an excess of seeing, Lamentations 2 is read alongside Jer. 4:5–31as a means of retrieving the voice of another (non-human Other) in the text.
| All Time | Past Year | Past 30 Days | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abstract Views | 156 | 30 | 1 |
| Full Text Views | 169 | 3 | 0 |
| PDF Views & Downloads | 22 | 9 | 2 |