- Adrian College, Department of Philosophy and Religion, 110 Madison St., Adrian, MI 49221
- 517-264-3959
Scott S. Elliott
Adrian College, Department of Philosophy and Religion, Faculty Member
- Drew University, Theological School, AlumnusMissouri State University, Religious Studies, Alumnusadd
- Roland Barthes, Biblical Studies, New Testament, Literary Criticism, Literary Theory, Ancient Novel, and 19 moreComics and Graphic Novels, Structuralism/Post-Structuralism, Critical Theory, Poststructuralism, New Testament Studies, Biblical Interpretation, Narrative, Narratology, Literature, World Literatures, Cultural Theory, Classics, Bible and Popular Culture, Life Writing (Literature), Heliodorus, Character in New Testament Narrative, Narrative Methods, Gospel of Mark, and Philippinesedit
- I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy, Religion, and Leadership at Adrian College (Adrian, Mich... moreI am an Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy, Religion, and Leadership at Adrian College (Adrian, Michigan, USA). My course offerings range across a wide territory, but my training is in New Testament and early Christianity, and my research interests gravitate toward literary theory, cultural studies, reception history, and the like.edit
In the first extended treatment of Pauline autobiographical texts since the 1980s, Scott S. Elliott reconsiders the autobiographical statements Paul makes throughout his letters (particularly Philippians 3:4b-6; Romans 7:14-25; 1... more
In the first extended treatment of Pauline autobiographical texts since the 1980s, 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) using contemporary literary theories concerning self-narration, and most especially, the theoretical work of Roland Barthes.
Elliott focuses on Barthes' later and underrepresented poststructuralist writings (including Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary, Camera Lucida, and A Lover's Discourse: Fragments), many of which touch either directly or indirectly on self-narration. Barthes’ work provides fruitful intertexts with which Elliott can interrogate and re-examine Paul's autobiographical vignettes. As Paul emerges variously as a novelistic, mythic, diseased, and dying self, Elliott illustrates how reading Paul and Barthes alongside one another can yield insightful new readings of the Pauline epistles.
Table of Contents:
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
https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/the-rustle-of-paul-9780567676351/
Elliott focuses on Barthes' later and underrepresented poststructuralist writings (including Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary, Camera Lucida, and A Lover's Discourse: Fragments), many of which touch either directly or indirectly on self-narration. Barthes’ work provides fruitful intertexts with which Elliott can interrogate and re-examine Paul's autobiographical vignettes. As Paul emerges variously as a novelistic, mythic, diseased, and dying self, Elliott illustrates how reading Paul and Barthes alongside one another can yield insightful new readings of the Pauline epistles.
Table of Contents:
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
https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/the-rustle-of-paul-9780567676351/
Research Interests:
"Reinventing Religious Studies offers readers an opportunity to trace the important trends and developments in Religious Studies over the last forty years. Over this time the study of religion has been transformed into a critical... more
"Reinventing Religious Studies offers readers an opportunity to trace the important trends and developments in Religious Studies over the last forty years. Over this time the study of religion has been transformed into a critical discipline informed by a wide range of perspectives from sociology to anthropology, politics to material culture, and economics to cultural theory.
Reinventing Religious Studies brings together key writings which have helped shape scholarship, teaching and learning in the field. All the essays are drawn from the CSSR Bulletin, a provocative, occasionally irreverent, and always critical journal which has long been at the centre of debates in Religious Studies.
This collection will prove invaluable for students and scholars of theory and method in Religious Studies. It offers readers a unique opportunity to understand the history of key issues in the study of religion and what remains central to the study of religion today.
SELECTED CONTRIBUTORS: Russell T. McCutcheon, Ninian Smart, Jonathan Z. Smith, Raymond B. Williams, Jacob Neusner, Walter H. Capps, Robert A. Segal, Arvind Sharma, Robert N. Bellah, James C. Livingston, Carol Christ, John A. Miles, Jr., Gary Lease, Darlene Juschka, and Gustavo Benavides."
Reinventing Religious Studies brings together key writings which have helped shape scholarship, teaching and learning in the field. All the essays are drawn from the CSSR Bulletin, a provocative, occasionally irreverent, and always critical journal which has long been at the centre of debates in Religious Studies.
This collection will prove invaluable for students and scholars of theory and method in Religious Studies. It offers readers a unique opportunity to understand the history of key issues in the study of religion and what remains central to the study of religion today.
SELECTED CONTRIBUTORS: Russell T. McCutcheon, Ninian Smart, Jonathan Z. Smith, Raymond B. Williams, Jacob Neusner, Walter H. Capps, Robert A. Segal, Arvind Sharma, Robert N. Bellah, James C. Livingston, Carol Christ, John A. Miles, Jr., Gary Lease, Darlene Juschka, and Gustavo Benavides."
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Translation is a fundamental aspect of biblical scholarship and an ever-present reality in a global context. Scholars interested in more than linguistically oriented translation problems of a traditional nature often struggle to find an... more
Translation is a fundamental aspect of biblical scholarship and an ever-present reality in a global context. Scholars interested in more than linguistically oriented translation problems of a traditional nature often struggle to find an interdisciplinary venue in which to share their work. These essays, by means of critical engagement with the translation, translation practices, and translation history of texts relevant to the study of Bible and ancient and modern Christianity, explore theoretical dimensions and contemporary implications of translations and translation practice. The contributors are George Aichele, Roland Boer, Virginia Burrus, Alan Cadwallader, K. Jason Coker, John Eipper, Scott S. Elliott, Raj Nadella, Flemming A. J. Nielsen, Christina Petterson, Naomi Seidman, Jaqueline du Toit, Esteban Voth, and Matt Waggoner.
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As readers, we are captivated by the resemblance of literary characters to actual persons. But it is precisely this illusion that allows characterization to play host to dominant ideologies of both ‘literature’ and ‘the self’. This is... more
As readers, we are captivated by the resemblance of literary characters to actual persons. But it is precisely this illusion that allows characterization to play host to dominant ideologies of both ‘literature’ and ‘the self’. This is especially true when we confuse narrative figures and historical persons.
Over the last thirty years, New Testament narrative criticism has developed into a major methodological approach in Biblical Studies. But for all its ingenuity and promise, it has been reluctant to let go of conventional historical-critical moorings. As a result, one is hard pressed to find any substantive difference between reconstructions of the historical Jesus and narrative-critical readings of the character Jesus.
Reconfiguring Mark’s Jesus endeavors to reorient and advance narrative criticism by analysing the Gospel of Mark’s characterization of the figure of Jesus in relation to three other fundamental aspects of narrative discourse: focalization, dialogue, and plot. This intertextual reading, in which Mark is set alongside two ancient novels—Leucippe and Clitophon and the Life of Aesop—problematizes implicitly modern notions of literary characters as autonomous ‘agents’, as well as ‘naturalizing’ treatments of literary characters as historical referents. Highlighting the inherent ambiguity of narrative discourse, particularly with regard to referentiality, human agency, and the complex relationship between literature and history, Reconfiguring Mark’s Jesus illustrates the diverse and complex ways that narratives, of necessity, produce fragmented characters that refract the inherent paradoxes of narrative itself and of human subjectivity.
Over the last thirty years, New Testament narrative criticism has developed into a major methodological approach in Biblical Studies. But for all its ingenuity and promise, it has been reluctant to let go of conventional historical-critical moorings. As a result, one is hard pressed to find any substantive difference between reconstructions of the historical Jesus and narrative-critical readings of the character Jesus.
Reconfiguring Mark’s Jesus endeavors to reorient and advance narrative criticism by analysing the Gospel of Mark’s characterization of the figure of Jesus in relation to three other fundamental aspects of narrative discourse: focalization, dialogue, and plot. This intertextual reading, in which Mark is set alongside two ancient novels—Leucippe and Clitophon and the Life of Aesop—problematizes implicitly modern notions of literary characters as autonomous ‘agents’, as well as ‘naturalizing’ treatments of literary characters as historical referents. Highlighting the inherent ambiguity of narrative discourse, particularly with regard to referentiality, human agency, and the complex relationship between literature and history, Reconfiguring Mark’s Jesus illustrates the diverse and complex ways that narratives, of necessity, produce fragmented characters that refract the inherent paradoxes of narrative itself and of human subjectivity.
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Readings in the Theory of Religion is an interdisciplinary Religious Studies resource for graduate and advanced undergraduate students. Readers will encounter the rare grouping of breakthrough texts by Wilfred Cantwell Smith and Jonathan... more
Readings in the Theory of Religion is an interdisciplinary Religious Studies resource for graduate and advanced undergraduate students. Readers will encounter the rare grouping of breakthrough texts by Wilfred Cantwell Smith and Jonathan Z. Smith in Religious Studies, alongside classic essays by Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, and Joan Wallach Scott in literary and cultural theory. Historically significant interventions such as those just named are accompanied by examples of recent, theoretically-informed research by scholars like Saba Mahmood, Tomoko Masuzawa, and Steven Moore. Readers are provided with the tools to become familiar with crucial theoretical debates in Religious Studies and related fields in the humanities and social sciences, and with models of contemporary writing that successfully approach the study of religion in savvy ways. Its three sections, ‘Map’, ‘Text’, and ‘Body’, speak to diverse methods, specialties, and emphases within the study of religion: the study of text and textuality, the study of ritual, the body, gender and sexuality, religion and race, religion and colonialism, and methodological and theoretical issues in the study of religion. As an introduction to theoretical and interdisciplinary approaches to the study of religion, Readings in the Theory of Religion is an indispensable starting point.
Contents:
Part One: Map
Preface by Matt Waggoner
1. Wilfred Cantwell Smith, "Religion in the West"
2. Talal Asad, "Genealogies of Religion"
3. David Chidester, "Frontiers of Comparison"
4. George Fredrickson, "Religion and the Invention of Racism"
5. Jonathan Z. Smith, "Map is not Territory"
Part Two: Text
Preface by Gary Phillips
1. Walter Benjamin, "The Task of the Translator"
2. Roland Barthes, "The Death of the Author"
3. Jonathan Z. Smith, "Sacred Persistence: Toward a Redescription of Canon"
4. Tomoko Masuzawa, "Original Lost: An Image of Myth and Ritual in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"
5. George Aichele, "The Imperial Bible"
Part Three: Body
Preface by Amy Hollywood
1. Saba Mahmood, "Feminist Theory, Embodiment, and the Docile Agent"
2. Joan Wallach Scott, "Experience"
3. Daniel Boyarin and Elizabeth Castelli, "Introduction: Foucault's The History of Sexuality: The Fourth Volume, or, A Field Left Fallow for Others To Till"
4. Stephen Moore, "Sex and the Single Apostle"
5. Daniel Boyarin and Jonathan Boyarin, "Diaspora: Generation and the Ground of Jewish Identity"
Contents:
Part One: Map
Preface by Matt Waggoner
1. Wilfred Cantwell Smith, "Religion in the West"
2. Talal Asad, "Genealogies of Religion"
3. David Chidester, "Frontiers of Comparison"
4. George Fredrickson, "Religion and the Invention of Racism"
5. Jonathan Z. Smith, "Map is not Territory"
Part Two: Text
Preface by Gary Phillips
1. Walter Benjamin, "The Task of the Translator"
2. Roland Barthes, "The Death of the Author"
3. Jonathan Z. Smith, "Sacred Persistence: Toward a Redescription of Canon"
4. Tomoko Masuzawa, "Original Lost: An Image of Myth and Ritual in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"
5. George Aichele, "The Imperial Bible"
Part Three: Body
Preface by Amy Hollywood
1. Saba Mahmood, "Feminist Theory, Embodiment, and the Docile Agent"
2. Joan Wallach Scott, "Experience"
3. Daniel Boyarin and Elizabeth Castelli, "Introduction: Foucault's The History of Sexuality: The Fourth Volume, or, A Field Left Fallow for Others To Till"
4. Stephen Moore, "Sex and the Single Apostle"
5. Daniel Boyarin and Jonathan Boyarin, "Diaspora: Generation and the Ground of Jewish Identity"
Research Interests: Religion, Comparative Religion, Sociology of Religion, Philosophy Of Religion, History of Religion, and 8 moreReligion and Politics, Religion and Sexuality, Psychology of Religion, Theory of Religion, History of Religions, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Religious Studies, and Anthropology of Religion
This essay compares and contrasts The Action Bible by Sergio Cariello and Doug Mauss, and Genesis Illustrated by R. Crumb, focusing foremost on the ways that each work handles gender and sexuality, particularly vis-a-vis Roland Barthes’s... more
This essay compares and contrasts The Action Bible by Sergio Cariello and Doug Mauss, and Genesis Illustrated by R. Crumb, focusing foremost on the ways that each work handles gender and sexuality, particularly vis-a-vis Roland Barthes’s concepts of readerly and writerly texts. The essay argues that the best of comic and graphic art productions of biblical literature does not attempt to replicate the work. Instead, by virtue of the inherently “guttural” language of the comics medium (i.e., speaking between the panels and enlisting readers in the process of writing the story), these works highlight the Bible’s own fragmentary nature, and thus leave open the possibility of a more “writerly” engagement with the Biblical text and sacred.
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This chapter summarizes the story of Mark’s gospel highlighting a variety of its key narrative aspects and emphasizing the discursive features that have most captured the interest of New Testament narrative critics. Next, it surveys the... more
This chapter summarizes the story of Mark’s gospel highlighting a variety of its key narrative aspects and emphasizing the discursive features that have most captured the interest of New Testament narrative critics. Next, it surveys the most significant scholarly literature on Mark written from a narrative-critical perspective, and draws attention to how narrative interpretations of Mark have paralleled the development of New Testament narrative criticism generally. Finally, it suggests two aspects of Mark’s narrative in need of further analysis: time and focalization. Taking Mark 6:7–30 as a test case, the chapter juxtaposes the film La jetée to demonstrate how the Markan narrator’s manipulation of time and focalization triggers a host of complex questions, and offers the reader greater interpretive freedom, even as it undermines any certainty the reader may have concerning what the narrative means.
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Graphic novels and comics have long provided a venue for visually portraying biblical narratives. While some provide a clever hook for devotees to capture the imagination in order to safely entertain the existing flock or to entice... more
Graphic novels and comics have long provided a venue for visually portraying biblical narratives. While some provide a clever hook for devotees to capture the imagination in order to safely entertain the existing flock or to entice would-be converts into the fold, others are not concerned primarily with any “faithful” visual rendering of biblical narrative. These productions interrogate and/or appropriate biblical narrative in a variety of ways while maintaining a high degree of fidelity to the requirements of the art form and to the expectations of its readers. This article investigates two works focused on the figure of Jesus, both of which share and exploit the iconoclastic nature and marginal status of the genre, and find in the figure of Jesus a narrative and character uniquely befitting of the form. While neither aims to render Jesus directly, each manages to capture something of both the discursive aspects of the gospel literature, and perhaps something of whatever counter-cultural message and disposition the historical Jesus may have had. Moreover, each manipulates the closure that readers provide through recourse to the familiar biblical text. I contend that these productions faithfully, if ironically, refract the subversive potential of both the biblical narrative and the figure of Jesus precisely by their infidelity to what might be loosely described as a more orthodox Christ.
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Juxtaposing the Life of Aesop and the Gospel of Mark, this article explores how ancient fiction destabilizes characters, which function as complex and shifting products of storied intersections. Characters are conscripted by discursive... more
Juxtaposing the Life of Aesop and the Gospel of Mark, this article explores how ancient fiction destabilizes characters, which function as complex and shifting products of storied intersections. Characters are conscripted by discursive plots reflecting both the mysteries of divine “providence” and the interpellative power of “discourse” itself. Plots are neither propelled by pre-existent “characters,” nor connotative of the essence of “characters;” rather, “subjects” are continually constructed and deconstructed in the fractured and ambiguous play of events and context. Ancient novels (reflecting the effects of empire, cultural displacement, and dialogism) represent human subjects as neither purely active nor purely passive. The article implicitly critiques biblical narrative criticism while reading the Gospel of Mark vis-à-vis ancient novels to model a different approach to ancient narrative that problematizes both notions of literary characters as autonomous agents or subjects, and treatments of literary characters as historical referents.
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New Testament narrative critics, unfortunately, have rarely brought narrative theory to bear on the letters of Paul, presumably because, as letters, Paul’s writings evince little resemblance to narrative discourse, on the surface.... more
New Testament narrative critics, unfortunately, have rarely brought narrative theory to bear on the letters of Paul, presumably because, as letters, Paul’s writings evince little resemblance to narrative discourse, on the surface. Autobiographical statements peppered throughout the Pauline corpus, however, offer a potentially fruitful point of entree for narrative analysis. As instances of self-narration, they are ripe for a poststructuralist examination that interrogates the vanishing presence and subsequent trace of the author. Romans 7:14-25 is the most controversial and complicated instance of self-narration in Paul’s oeuvre. Here, Paul performs what is at once both autobiography (of a sort) and a rhetorical speech-in-character. Paul writes himself as a character, which is at once also the narrator. As such, the pericope intertwines and embodies narrative discourse, history, autobiography, represented speech, and complex focalization. And by positioning Paul as a character-narrator, it in turn renders his reliability unstable. Roland Barthes, in his experimental autobiography, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, twice makes the provocative statement, “All this must be considered as if spoken by a character in a novel—or rather by several characters,” which is an especially apt metaphor in this context. His comment raises questions concerning the relationship between literary characters and the self of autobiography, and the relationship of language and the body to the author, temporality, and death. In order to address these questions, I draw on Barthes’ autobiography (and other of his writings) to perform a poststructuralist narratological reading of Romans 7. With literary rather than historical or psychological interests foremost in view, I take up each of the aforementioned diegetical aspects in an effort to read “Paul” as a figure of his own writing, and to demonstrate how “Paul” rustles between character and subject in the ambivalent space of writing.