Read more
List of contents
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Chapter 1: The Novelistic Self
Chapter 2: The Rustle of Paul
Chapter 3: The Myth of Paul
Chapter 4: The Disease of Paul
Chapter 5: The Death of Paul
Postscript: Writer Paul
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Scott S. Elliott is Professor in the Department of Philosophy, Religion, and Leadership at Adrian College (Michigan, USA). He is the author of Reconfiguring Mark's Jesus: Narrative Criticism After Poststructuralism (2011) and co-editor of Bible and Theory: Essays in Biblical Interpretation in Honor of Stephen D. Moore (2020).
Summary
Scott S. Elliott reconsiders the autobiographical statements Paul makes throughout his letters (particularly Philippians 3:4b-6; Romans 7:14-25; 1 Corinthians 9:19-23 and 2 Corinthians 12:1-10) in light of the theoretical work of Roland Barthes.
Elliott draws particularly on Barthes' later poststructuralist writings, many of which touch either directly or indirectly on self-narration (e.g., Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary, Camera Lucida, and A Lover's Discourse: Fragments). These provide fruitful dialogue partners with which Elliott can interrogate and examine Paul's own writings and consider the ways in which Paul saw himself and how the application of this theory can yield a greater understanding of Paul's letters.
Foreword
Examines Paul's self-understanding and references to himself in his letters in light of the work and theories of Roland Barthes.
Additional text
In this remarkable book, Scott S. Elliott suggests a different way of looking at important texts, by reading Paul in a manner proposed by both Roland Barthes and Barthes’ contemporary, Susan Sontag — not by looking past or through the text (for Oedipal meanings, structured class relations, the expression of some well-defined self or experience, etc.), but at the work itself. In this approach, the point is less about interpretation than it is about pleasure, but what Elliott has done so well is to show us that to take pleasure in the texts of Paul, to look at them and not past them, is no disservice to Paul or to us. In the spirit of Barthes’ ‘pleasure of the text’ (and Sontag’s ‘erotics of art’), Elliott demonstrates that remaining open to the ‘rustle of Paul’ requires extraordinary care and sensuous attunement to language.
