Description 49
The New Literary Criticism
Description
"Literary criticism” is a catchall designation that embraces a wide variety of contemporary approaches to the Gospels. What binds these approaches together is an interest in applying contemporary literary theories to the interpretation of the Gospels. Many who employ such techniques are professedly reacting against what they perceive to be an excessive and unproductive preoccupation with historical concerns. Investigations of the prehistory of the Synoptic Gospels, such as dominate form and source criticism, have resulted, it is claimed, in a "critical distancing of the text” that "has transformed biblical writings into museum pieces without contemporary relevance.” 82 Nor does redaction criticism escape censure, for it too, although concerned with the final stage in the process, is nevertheless rooted in the enterprise of tradition-history. What is needed, it is argued, is a new approach whereby the Gospels are read "as they are” and interpreted by means of contemporary literary theory.
In place of barren studies of tradition history, modern literary critics want to look at the text as it is. How it originated, what sources it incorporates, and even who wrote it are unimportant. With many modern literary critics, the text is considered to have, as it were, a life of its own. The meaning it conveys is not tied to its historical origin—whether we think of that origin as located in a community or an author—but to the way it functions as it is read by the modern interpreter. For many literary critics, then, we cannot speak of a true or false meaning of any given gospel text or of the gospel as a whole but only of my meaning and your meaning. Meaning is located not in an author’s intention but in the encounter of text and reader. This meaning is often seen to be the product of certain so-called deep structures—basic, universal ways of putting things— that are found in the Gospels. Structuralism, a broad movement that incorporates several different approaches, seeks to identify these structures, classify them, and use them as an aid to interpretation. 83