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a symposium on
Re-Writing the Bible: Devotion, Diatribe and Dialogue
14th-15th June 2010
University of Glasgow
Keynote speakers: Sara Maitland, Michelene Wandor and Michael Schmidt
“Scripture [...] has always been a radically layered, plurally authored, multiply motivated composite, full of fascinating mysteries, gaps, and inconsistencies, a garden of delight to the exegete.”
- Alicia Suskin Ostriker
“…there is no reading of a work which is not also a ‘re-writing’.”
- Terry Eagleton
A recent exhibition at the Glasgow Gallery of Modern Art consisted of a bible, laid open alongside a supply of pens, with the invitation, “If you feel you’ve been excluded from the Bible, please feel free to find a way to write yourself back in.” The comments scribbled in the margins, and the very notion of ‘writing in the Bible’ became the subject of a widespread controversy, resulting in the gallery’s decision to place this bible inside a perspex cube, effectively sealing it off and protecting it from what might be deemed ‘undesirable’ commentary. Visitors were still invited to write comments, but now they were written on sheets of paper that were then selected and inserted between the bible’s pages every evening by gallery staff.
In light of this very present debate, Re-Writing the Bible: Devotion, Diatribe and Dialogue invites poets, writers, and scholars to engage with interdisciplinary questions surrounding the phenomena of retellings or revisions of Bible in creative writing. These retellings have a heritage that, arguably, starts within the books of the Bible itself and stretches across many literatures and traditions. This symposium asks why contemporary writers have chosen to rework this particular source text, and what stances they have taken towards it: faithful, using creative writing as a means of prayerful reflection or theological exegesis? Or furious, a railing against the Bible’s injustices and absences? Or a mixture of both, a sometimes difficult, sometimes delightful kind of dialogue? If every reading is also a re-writing, then it follows that every re-writing is also a reading, and for this reason many biblical scholars are fascinated by the literary ‘afterlives’ of the scriptures, the ways in which the Bible is sustained by creative imaginations in cultural settings and times very distant from its own writing and compilation.
All are welcome to attend the keynote panels and short paper sessions of this symposium. Click on the link to the ReWriting the Bible for information on the panels. Email rewritingbible2010@gmail.com with any enquiries.
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