Cantitate/Preț
Produs

Song of Exile: The Enduring Mystery of Psalm 137

Autor David W. Stowe
en Limba Engleză Hardback – 19 mai 2016
"By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion." The line that begins Psalm 137 is one of the most lyrical of the Hebrew Bible, and has been used since its genesis to evoke the grief and protest of exiled, displaced, or marginalized communities. The psalm is most directly a product of the Babylonian exile--the roughly fifty-year period after Jerusalem was destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar's army and many of its leading Judeans taken northeast into captivity. Despite the psalm's popularity, little has been written about its reception during the more than 2,500 years since that period. In Babylon Revisited David Stowe addresses this gap using a wide-ranging, interdisciplinary approach that includes textual analysis, historical overview, and a study of the psalm's place in popular culture. Stowe locates its use in the American Revolution and the Civil Rights movement, and internationally by anti-colonial Jamaican Rastafari and immigrants from Ireland, Korea, and Cuba. He studies musical references ranging from the Melodians Rivers of Babylon to the score in Kazakh film Tulpan. Based on numerous interviews with musicians, theologians, and writers, Stowe reconstructs the rich and varied reception history of this widely used, yet mysterious text.The book is broken up into three parts that closely examine each of the psalm's stanzas. Stowe concludes by exploring the often ignored final words: "Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones." Usually excised from liturgy and forgotten by scholars, Stowe finds these words echoed in modern occurrences of genocide or ethnic cleansing, and more generally in the culture of vengeance that has existed in North America from the earliest conflicts with Native Americans. Exploring the presence and absence of these words in modern culture is the culmination of Stowe's study as he weaves together the fascinating story of how Psalm 137 has both shaped and been shaped by our understanding of violence, pain, oppression, and justice.
Citește tot Restrânge

Preț: 18726 lei

Preț vechi: 22936 lei
-18% Nou

Puncte Express: 281

Preț estimativ în valută:
3585 3734$ 2975£

Carte tipărită la comandă

Livrare economică 03-08 februarie

Preluare comenzi: 021 569.72.76

Specificații

ISBN-13: 9780190466831
ISBN-10: 0190466839
Pagini: 232
Ilustrații: 10
Dimensiuni: 155 x 239 x 23 mm
Greutate: 0.45 kg
Editura: Oxford University Press
Colecția OUP USA
Locul publicării:New York, United States

Recenzii

Stowe's study of Psalm 137 is one of the best examples of reception history written for nonspecialists, a riveting investigation that takes the reader into surprising places of American culture and beyond...[I]t proves to be nothing short of eye opening.
David Stowe's focus is on subsequent, even contemporary use of the psalm, what we now call 'reception history.' Readers will be astonished by the rich inventory of belated uses of the psalm that Stowe has provided, mostly musical and in contexts of anguish. The psalm is now impressively contemporary with its pulses of pathos, resolve, and a will for vengeance.
Breathtaking! David Stowe's dazzling gloss on Psalm 137 and its compelling transit across centuries of American and European cultural, religious, and musical life is a wondrous testament to learning, curiosity, and the power of enthralling narrative. Song of Exile uplifts the power of words as few books do, a haunting exercise of scholarship and moral imagination.
In this elegant account of Psalm 137 and its textual and musical reception, David Stowe marshals extraordinary erudition and interpretive imagination to fashion a probing inquiry into the perennial human experience of exile. Song of Exile invites readers to ponder history, memory, vengeance, forgiveness, and forgetting as classically expressed in the Psalmist's lyric 'By the Waters of Babylon' and movingly explored by Stowe's commentary on its afterlife from the biblical era to our own times.

Notă biografică

David W. Stowe teaches English and Religious Studies at Michigan State University, where he is interim chair of the English Department. During the 2012-13 academic year, Stowe held a research fellowship at Yale's Institute of Sacred Music. His most recent book is No Sympathy for the Devil: Christian Pop Music and the Transformation of American Evangelicalism. His previous book, How Sweet the Sound: Music in the Spiritual Lives of Americans won the Deems Taylor Award from ASCAP.