Poetry, Catastrophe, and Hope in the Vision of Isaiah de Francis Landy

Poetry, Catastrophe, and Hope in the Vision of Isaiah

Francis Landy

The book of Isaiah is one of the longest and strangest books of the Hebrew Bible, composed over several centuries and traversing the catastrophe that befell the two kingdoms of Israel and Judah in the 8th and 6th centuries BCE. Francis Landy's book tells the story of the poetic response to catastrophe, and the hope for a new and perfect world on the other side. The study traces two parallel developments: the displacement of the Davidic promise onto the Persian Empire, Israel, and the prophet himself; and the transition from exclusively male images of the deity to the matching of male and female prototypes, whereby YHWH takes the place of the warrior goddess.Poetry, Catastrophe, and Hope in the Book of Isaiah consists of close readings of individual passages in Isaiah, commencing with Chapter One and the problems of beginning, and ending with Deutero-Isaiah, composed subsequent to the Babylonian exile. The volume is arranged thematically as well as sequentially: the first chapter following the introduction concerns gender, the second death, the third the Oracles about the Nations. At the centre there is what Landy calls 'the constitutive enigma', Isaiah's commission in his vision to speak so that people will not understand. This renders the entire book potentially incomprehensible; the more we try to understand it, the greater the difficulty. For Landy, this creates a model of reading and writing, the challenge and the risk of going up blind alleys, of trying to make sense of a disastrous world. Isaiah's commission pervades the book. Throughout there is a promise of an age of clarity as well as social and political transformation, which is always deferred beyond the horizon. Hence it is a book without an ending, or with multiple endings. In the final chapters, the author turns to the central Chapter Thirty-Three, a mise-en-abyme of the book and a prayer for deliverance, and the issues of exile and the possibility of return. Like every poetic work, particularly in an era of cultural collapse, it is a critique of the past and a hope for a new humanity.

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This innovative and beautifully written monograph delves deep into the poetic vision of the book of Isaiah. Landy's powerful prose creates a gallery of evocative and conflicting images, as he lays bare the inherently dialectic character of the book. All its central characters - God, Jerusalem, the Davidic heir, even death itself - are unstable entities that evolve and metamorphose throughout the book, yet ultimately return to their earlier state. God, Isaiah's male protagonist is also a gender-fluid deity, Jerusalem, his female counterpart, is simultaneously an attractive Edenic beauty and a soiled object of abhorrence, and the prophet turns out to be a liminal figure who negotiates between the two.
It is an unusual approach, but a stimulating one that brings this complex prophetic book alive in new ways.
This is a significant work grounded in Landy's distinguished career as a reader of the book of Isaiah. The introduction is a well-informed overview of some key critical issues in Isaiah, and almost reads like an introduction to a commentary. The rest of the book, however, is a literary exploration of only selected portions of the book, organized around a set of themes including parenthood, gender, death, kingship, and exile.... In the conclusions, he self consciously engages the methodological issues around synchronic and diachronic readings of the book. L. acknowledges his work can be dense and not thesis driven, but for those who know the book of Isaiah well, this is rich and essential reading.
This book is a gift to its readers and to Isaiah's. We are in Frances Landy's debt for having written it.
Like a beautiful bouquet, Francis Landy's newest book treats readers to an efflorescence of various passages from the book of Isaiah, each one an exquisite specimen, altogether a breathtaking arrangement. A similar work would be difficult to find...Landy is one of the most sensitive, creative, thoughtful, and knowledgeable critics in the field, and I cannot overstate my recommendation of this book as a remarkable achievement that will be an incredibly helpful resource for all who work on Isaiah for the foreseeable future.
Francis Landy has always made the case for prophetic literature as poetry. In this book, he marshals theoretical, thematic, and intertextual evidence to present Isaiah as a poet engaged in multiple forms of communication. Landy does well to separate the purported Isaiah from the book of the same name, though recognizing that the power of textuality obscures the relationship with this nonwriting author and the economics and politics of book making.
[Landy's] deconstructive approach reveals various fissures in Isaiah's poetry and imagery, which underscore a fundamental indeterminacy in its prophetic imagination. In a world where simplification is often held to be a virtue, letting the text continue to be strange and obscure is a challenge - one that more of us should take up. This book is the result of a lifetime thinking and writing about the book of Isaiah. It wears its erudition lightly, but that erudition infuses every page ... Landy engages closely with the Hebrew and delights in alliteration, word play, and resonances of words. The book is a tour de force and an outstanding piece of biblical scholarship both because of its sophisticated methodology and its insights into Isaiah as an anthology of prophetic poetry.
Landy's work in biblical studies certainly has important implications for the study of religion. He shows us the complexity of meaning, that we should not shy away from the difficulty it engenders, and the poetic play of the interpretive act. Taken together, we witness in his work the idea of human ingenuity-in our data and in ourselves-which constantly strives to make sense of the worlds we inhabit.

Notă biografică

Francis Landy taught Jewish Studies and Hebrew Bible for 31 years (1984-2015) at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, in Canada. His area of specialization is the Hebrew Bible, focusing on the literary interpretation of the text. He has published three books and numerous articles, on all areas of the Hebrew Bible, but the book of Isaiah has been his focus for the last twenty years. He has interests in literary and religious studies theory, postmodernism, and Kabbalah. He was president of the Canadian Society of Biblical Studies in 2009 and 2010, and sits on various editorial boards. He lives in Victoria.

Poetry, Catastrophe, and Hope in the Vision of Isaiah

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Poetry, Catastrophe, and Hope in the Vision of Isaiah

Preț: 718.60 lei

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Preț: 718^.60 lei