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The riddle of Psalm 111

Marc Zvi Brettler

in Scriptural Exegesis: The Shapes of Culture and the Religious Imagination: Essays in Honour of Michael Fishbane

This chapter pays tribute to Fishbane's extraordinary philological and literary skills. Arguing on the basis of careful textual analysis as well as inner-biblical interpretation, it urges ... More

This chapter pays tribute to Fishbane's extraordinary philological and literary skills. Arguing on the basis of careful textual analysis as well as inner-biblical interpretation, it urges reconsideration of the classification of Psalm 111. Psalm 111 is seen as a ‘riddle psalm’ within the larger category of Torah psalms rather than as a historical psalm.Less

Μάγειρος ποιητής: Language and Character in Antiphanes

Gregory W. Dobrov

in The Language of Greek Comedy

This chapter examines the riddling and dithyrambic language of the cook in Middle Comedy. It shows that Aristophanic paratragedy is not simply turned into paradithyramb. As a genre, dithyramb has no ... More

This chapter examines the riddling and dithyrambic language of the cook in Middle Comedy. It shows that Aristophanic paratragedy is not simply turned into paradithyramb. As a genre, dithyramb has no importance for comedy, so that it becomes difficult to speak of parody or even intertextuality. It is only the verbal art of dithyramb which is transferred into comedy and becomes a new ‘special effect’. Whereas in Old Comedy virtually every character can have a paratragic line or two, in Middle Comedy dithyrambic style becomes a prerogative of one particular type of speaker: cooks and servants. By speaking in riddles, the cook appropriates a verbal genre that ‘belongs’ to the upper classes who meet at symposia, and by using a dithyrambic medium in the formulation of these riddles he gives his social pretension or λαζονεία expression also on a linguistic level.Less

Cosmos and Canon

M. L. West

in Indo-European Poetry and Myth

This chapter discusses so-called ‘Indo-European perceptions of the world, and their codification’. The first part deals with cosmology and cosmogony. The second part deals with the forms of ... More

This chapter discusses so-called ‘Indo-European perceptions of the world, and their codification’. The first part deals with cosmology and cosmogony. The second part deals with the forms of expression in which beliefs and opinions on these matters were typically encapsulated — not articulated poetic compositions but catechisms, proverbs, riddles, and the like.Less

Innuendo and the Audience

Michael Fontaine

in Funny Words in Plautine Comedy

This chapter continues the investigation of Plautus’ use of irony and innuendo. Jokes and riddles in Poenulus, Rudens, Amphitryo, and Stichus suggest that characters’ onstage actions occasionally ... More

This chapter continues the investigation of Plautus’ use of irony and innuendo. Jokes and riddles in Poenulus, Rudens, Amphitryo, and Stichus suggest that characters’ onstage actions occasionally betray their claims or that the jokes they make sometimes presuppose a Greek background. Discussion then turns to the composition and character of Plautus’ audience. Contrary to many prevailing views, it is concluded from archaeological, demographic, and literary evidence that Plautus’ primary audience was essentially aristocratic, alert, well educated, philhellenic, sophisticated, and reasonably well acquainted through education with Greek literature and culture, including the comedy of Menander and Greek oratory. Extended discussions include the Roman “Bacchanalia affair” of 186 bc alongside Plautus’ Truculentus and a speech of Hyperides, connections between the poetry of Sappho and Plautus’ Miles Gloriosus and Curculio (Gorgylio), and connections between the poetry of Callimachus and Plautus’ Pseudolus (Pseudylus). It is concluded that Plautus should be seen as an author in tune with the poetic currents and developments of the contemporary Hellenistic world rather than wholly divorced from them.Less

The Inescapable Queen

Inna Naroditskaya

in Bewitching Russian Opera: The Tsarina from State to Stage

The first scene of the opera Queen of Spades introduces major leitmotifs associated with double passions—love and gambling—which, though contrasting, share an identical melody. Unexpected, surprising ... More

The first scene of the opera Queen of Spades introduces major leitmotifs associated with double passions—love and gambling—which, though contrasting, share an identical melody. Unexpected, surprising dualities, doubles, pairings penetrate both Pushkin’s tale and Tchaikovsky’s score. Gherman, by his very name linked to St. Germain (the original owner of the secret of three winning cards), repeats, reverses and distorts his predecessor’s story. Young Liza is paired with the countess (her grandmother in Tchaikovsky) and at the same time with her friend Polina. Liza replays the tale of the shepherdess, which unfolds in three fragments performed (in reverse time) by three female characters—the love arietta borrowed from Grétry and sung by the countess (scene 4), the shepherdess’s idyllic union enacted by Liza and Polina in a play within a play (scene 3), and Polina’s elegiac romance (scene 2). In a story collapsing times and confusing identities, a riddle between creators and spectators, the female circle is extended and empowered by one more person, a silent monarchical shadow at the falling curtain of the third scene.Less

Dismembering the Ducat in The Merchant of Venice

David Landreth

in The Face of Mammon: The Matter of Money in English Renaissance Literature

Everyone knows that The Merchant of Venice is all about money, but if the characters of the play know it too, they do their best to avoid saying so. This chapter examines the variety of ways in which ... More

Everyone knows that The Merchant of Venice is all about money, but if the characters of the play know it too, they do their best to avoid saying so. This chapter examines the variety of ways in which the play's characters seek to articulate extramonetary values for the objects of their desires, and so disavow the centrality of the three thousand ducats through which their desires contend. The mechanism of disavowal is that of dividing and regrouping the play's central problematic into not only different problems, but different kinds of problem: the twofold dilemma (as between justice and mercy, or Jew and Christian), the unitary mystery of the self to the self, the triplicate riddle of the three caskets. In the play's cynical assessment of the relation of its individuals to its society, self-knowledge is willfully mystified in order to validate the institution that, by its own consensual disavowal, holds the Venetian commonwealth together: its money.Less

Narrative Techniques in Irish and Welsh, II: The Riddling ‘Watchman Device’

Patrick Sims‐Williams

in Irish Influence on Medieval Welsh Literature

With particular reference to Togail Bruidne Da Derga and Branwen this chapter discusses the narrative technique called the ‘Watchman Device’. It is illustrated from Homer, Statius, Valerius Flaccus, ... More

With particular reference to Togail Bruidne Da Derga and Branwen this chapter discusses the narrative technique called the ‘Watchman Device’. It is illustrated from Homer, Statius, Valerius Flaccus, the Shahnama, the Mahabharata, Laxdœla saga, Thithreks saga, the Bórama, Táin Bó Cúailnge, Serbian and Scottish Gaelic ballads, and even Kenneth Grahame. The Irish and Welsh examples have undergone the influence, perhaps independently, of the ‘Slavic Antithesis’ of Chapter 4 and of international landscape riddles. Riddles from around the world are compared and the relationship beween riddle, metaphor, kenning, and myth is discussed.Less

Framed

Christi A. Merrill

in Riddles of Belonging: India in Translation and Other Tales of Possession

Here the paradoxical temporalities of Narayana Rao's riddling community referred to in the opening chapter assume a metaphorical locatedness in riddling framed narratives that Eagleton describes as a ... More

Here the paradoxical temporalities of Narayana Rao's riddling community referred to in the opening chapter assume a metaphorical locatedness in riddling framed narratives that Eagleton describes as a “semiotic puzzle”: such repetitions create a space for themselves that seems both very much their own world, he observes, and yet intimately connected to the world outside. To judge the effect of a story such as that of the switched heads requires we first set about solving this semiotic puzzle. Bakhtin insists that festive laughter “is not an individual reaction to some isolated ‘comic’ event,” but is instead “the laughter of all the people.” In a move that resonates with the logic of the riddle of belonging, Bakhtin posits an individual speaker whose words are “actually a cry, that is, a loud interjection in the midst of a crowd, coming out of the crowd and addressed to it.” This joyous expression of resistance requires us to think carefully about the ways we are defining a “you” in relation to a first-person subject position.Less

Conclusion

Isabelle Torrance

in Metapoetry in Euripides

The Conclusion draws together the main arguments of the book through reference to an Aristophanic joke about Euripidean tone. The suggestion that Euripides implicitly invites the audience to ... More

The Conclusion draws together the main arguments of the book through reference to an Aristophanic joke about Euripidean tone. The suggestion that Euripides implicitly invites the audience to interpret his metapoetic games is framed within the context of the Athenian love of riddles and the dramatists’ hopes for intelligent spectators.Less

Simplicity as a Pragmatic Criterion for Deciding What Hypotheses to Take Seriously

Gilbert Harman

in Reasoning, Meaning, and Mind

Simplicity is used in curve‐fitting and can be illustrated by Goodman's ‘new riddle of induction.’ Taking the simplicity of a hypothesis to depend entirely on the simplicity of the way it is ... More

Simplicity is used in curve‐fitting and can be illustrated by Goodman's ‘new riddle of induction.’ Taking the simplicity of a hypothesis to depend entirely on the simplicity of the way it is represented does not work, because simplicity of representation is too dependent on the method of representation, and any hypothesis can be represented simply. An alternative ‘semantic’ theory also has problems. A ‘computational’ theory is defended that considers how easy it is to use a hypothesis to get answers to questions in which one is interested.Less

The ‘dark Welsh’ as slaves and slave raiders in Exeter Book riddles 52 and 72¹

Lindy Brady

in Writing the Welsh Borderlands in Anglo-Saxon England

Chapter three argues that a group of Old English riddles located in the borderlands between Anglo-Saxon England and Wales reflect a common regional culture by depicting shared values of a warrior ... More

Chapter three argues that a group of Old English riddles located in the borderlands between Anglo-Saxon England and Wales reflect a common regional culture by depicting shared values of a warrior elite across the ostensible Anglo-Welsh divide. These riddles, which link the ‘dark Welsh’ to agricultural labour, have long been understood to depict the Welsh as slaves and thus reflect Anglo-Saxon awareness of both ethnic and social division. Drawing upon understudied Welsh legal material, this chapter argues that these riddles have a multilayered solution in which the Welsh are both slaves and slave traders, complicating readings of negative Anglo/Welsh relations. This polysemic solution reveals that the Welsh, like the Anglo-Saxons, were stratified by class into the enslaved and a warrior elite with less distance from the Anglo-Saxons than has been understood. The location of these riddles on the mearc further characterises the Welsh borderlands in the early period as a distinctive region which was notorious for cattle raiding. These riddles counter the common perception that the Welsh borderlands were defined by Offa’s Dyke, suggesting that this region is better understood as a space which both Anglo-Saxons and Welsh permeated on raids.Less

Wittgenstein, Joyce, and the Vanishing Problem of Life

Karen Zumhagen-Yekplé

in A Different Order of Difficulty: Literature after Wittgenstein

Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and the “Ithaca” episode of Joyce’s Ulysses explore problems of “a different order of difficulty” through the guise of the more routinely difficult “propositions of natural ... More

Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and the “Ithaca” episode of Joyce’s Ulysses explore problems of “a different order of difficulty” through the guise of the more routinely difficult “propositions of natural science.” Both are structured in a catalogue of questions and assertions that seems to progress toward a conclusion the author ultimately withholds; rely on pseudoscientific precision in their treatments of moral and existential matters; make performative use of didacticism and prophetic tones; and echo scripture alongside the language of science and logic. Joyce and Wittgenstein challenge readers to understand their respective authorial (and deauthorizing) strategies and the relationship of their faux-doctrines to their literary and philosophical aims. They gesture at a secular conversion characterized by a “vanishing” of problems that accompanies “seeing the world aright” in the way that Joyce’s Leopold Bloom does by adopting an attitude of reflective peace and resolution that grants him temporary rest from the onslaught of questions of “Ithaca’s” catechetical form. Bloom’s ethical perspective thus resembles Wittgenstein’s transformative “happy” outlook. The Tractatus seeks to steer readers toward a secular-spiritual transfiguration similar to the one Bloom achieves. Wittgenstein’s transformative impulse is galvanized by Tolstoy, but also coincides with Nietzsche’s conception of redemption as a post-Christian transfiguration.Less

The Old English Grammar of the Soul

D. Vance Smith

in Arts of Dying: Literature and Finitude in Medieval England

This chapter examines the relation between death and the voice in Old English poetry and pedagogical texts, especially Aelfric's Grammar and Colloquies and two versions of a debate between the body ... More

This chapter examines the relation between death and the voice in Old English poetry and pedagogical texts, especially Aelfric's Grammar and Colloquies and two versions of a debate between the body and the soul. The division of the soul from the body at death is framed in terms similar to the division of being into constituent categories, and the partition of language into its smallest component. The relation between these elements and the meaning of which they are part is like the relation of the vox to the body, a cryptic figure like the riddle.Less

Wit and Wisdom: The Worldview of the Old Norse-Icelandic Riddles and Their Relationship to Eddic Poetry

Hannah Burrows

in Eddic, Skaldic, and Beyond: Poetic Variety in Medieval Iceland and Norway

Hannah Burrows discusses the riddles found in Hervarar saga ok Heiðreks, a thirteenth-century fornaldarsaga. Little scholarly attention has been directed toward the riddles from the Old ... More

Hannah Burrows discusses the riddles found in Hervarar saga ok Heiðreks, a thirteenth-century fornaldarsaga. Little scholarly attention has been directed toward the riddles from the Old Norse-Icelandic tradition. Hervarar saga contains thirty seven riddles in eddic meters, incorporated into the prose narrative as an exchange of wisdom between King Heiðrekr and the god Óðinn. Burrows argues that the riddles were collected by the saga author (or redactor) who then wrote this episode for the express purpose of incorporating them into the narrative. The riddles resist categorization and classification. Burrows calls them “beyond eddic.” They are composed in “eddic” meters, but they also have affinity with skaldic poetry. Burrows shows how the thematic content of the riddles situates them both within and outside the eddic tradition, and her detailed study of the ordering of the riddles in relationship to one another offers clues to the intentions of the saga author who inserted them into his prosimetrical narrative. Those interested in the wider medieval tradition of riddling will welcome her discussion of how this Nordic manifestation fits into it.Less

Jazz with Strings: Between Jazz and the Great American Songbook

John Howland

in Jazz/Not Jazz: The Music and Its Boundaries

From roughly 1940 to 1945, a number of prominent big band leaders expanded their ensembles by adding strings and other orchestral instruments. Capitol Records stood at the forefront of this movement ... More

From roughly 1940 to 1945, a number of prominent big band leaders expanded their ensembles by adding strings and other orchestral instruments. Capitol Records stood at the forefront of this movement in the late 1940s and 1950s, releasing a variety of richly orchestrated, urbane, jazz-inflected recordings, including acclaimed releases by Frank Sinatra and Nelson Riddle. While the postwar period saw the decline of the traditional big band as a commercial force in popular culture, these jazz-pop ventures reinvented swing for the hi-fi era. Through close study of select arrangements, contemporary cultural discourse, and marketing and promotion, this essay articulates the larger aesthetic issues and cultural conditions that shaped the hybrid, middlebrow ideals of these jazz-with-strings subgenres.Less

“Hello Stranger”: The Carter Family Decca 5479

Tony Russell

in Rural Rhythm: The Story of Old-Time Country Music in 78 Records

This chapter discusses Carter Family, “Hello Stranger”, white blues, family bands, Leslie Riddles, and Decca Records

Sex Assignment Around 1900. From a Legal to a Clinical Issue

Geertje Mak

in Doubting Sex: Inscriptions, Bodies and Selves in Nineteenth-century Hermaphrodite Case Histories

This chapter describes how physicians' relationships to the law had become troubled by the end of the nineteenth century. It discusses the conflict between legal purpose and a humanitarian ... More

This chapter describes how physicians' relationships to the law had become troubled by the end of the nineteenth century. It discusses the conflict between legal purpose and a humanitarian perspective that came to a head in discussions concerning plastic surgery on genitals and secondary sex characteristics. It is shown that when doctors were not consulted within a legal context, their diagnostic role was decidedly not the same as that of a judge. Some physicians had strong doubts as to whether the gonads alone should be decisive within a legal context. J. Riddle Goffe presented a brief summary of state-of-the-art medical thinking on hermaphroditism in which Goffe shows himself to be a true believer and supporter of the gonadal ‘true sex’ theory. Both Franz Ludwig von Neugebauer and Fred Taussig took the patient's ‘sexual desires’ as the marker of psychological sex. The position of hermaphrodites underwent structural change.Less

Riddle

Douglas Gray

in Simple Forms: Essays on Medieval English Popular Literature

The riddle is another ancient form, related, it seems, to the proverb, and like it used in various levels of culture and literature from the Old English period onwards. Riddles are often deliberately ... More

The riddle is another ancient form, related, it seems, to the proverb, and like it used in various levels of culture and literature from the Old English period onwards. Riddles are often deliberately ambiguous, especially so those which have apparently obscene solutions. The chapter discusses various literary uses, including poems which present a riddle contest which may still have a forfeit of death, and the often imaginative use of enigma in both religious and secular poems, which create a playful universe in which inanimate and animate creatures speak and describe themselves, to the simpler, more popular, Demaundes Joyous of the early sixteenth century and popular puzzles.Less