Performance Criticism

Aim: This is a collection of essays that will join the Cascade Books (Wipf & Stock) series entitled Biblical Performance Criticism (on orality, memory, translation, rhetoric, and discourse).

Link to Bible Translation: Essays are welcome that deal with any of these orality/performance dimensions as it relates to our specific focus on Bible interpretation, translation, and transmission. Specifically, we seek essays that build on the exegetical insights from orality/performance studies and respond to this question: how does this affect Bible translation?

The Interface of Orality and Writing

Hearing, Seeing, Writing in New Genres

edited by Annette Weissenrieder and Robert B. Coote

coming in Sept 2010 from Mohr Siebeck

The essays in this collection address the competing and complementary roles of visual media, forms of memory, oral performance, and literacy and popular culture in the ancient Mediterranean world. Incorporating both customary and innovative perspectives, the essays advance the frontiers of our understanding of the nature of ancient texts as regards audibility and performance, the vital importance of the visual in the comprehension of texts, and basic concepts of communication, particularly the need to account for disjunctive and non-reciprocal social relations in communication.

My First Experience Performing

by Margaret E. Lee

MargaretLee I used to think that I appreciated the importance of performance because I have long been interested in the spoken character of the New Testament and have long thought that its compositions are organized by sound rather than by concepts. But after spending more than a decade studying the sounds of the Sermon on the Mount, I received a great gift: the challenge to perform the Sermon. My work up to this point had focused on sound because I had become convinced that the New Testament's first audiences experienced these compositions almost exclusively by hearing them spoken aloud. Sound, I reasoned, must organize the compositions and train a listener's ear, much like music. But for all my appreciation of sound and its communicative power, I had never attempted a performance of the Sermon. So at the 2008 meeting of the SBL, David Rhoads laid down the gauntlet. "You have to," he said. I realized he was right. So when I was invited to speak at Snowstar's annual conference in 2009, I saw my opportunity and began preparing my performance.