Some Notes On Editions of the Towneley Cycle: Part 3. Reception Before The First Edition

This is a continuation of my notes on the manuscript HM1, the only manuscript source for the Towneley Cycle, begun here and continued in Part 2 here. I look at the manuscript in terms of what Jerome McGann calls “bibliographic codes,” features of the manuscript that communicate non-lexical meaning (that is, meaning apart from the signification of the actual words of the text).

In this post I look at the work’s reception before the first modern edition of the work.

These posts are controlled substances, with heavy street value, used at parties to raise the euphoria to nearly-criminal levels.

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Nunsploitation Films And The True Sexual Conscience of Religion

We’ve all had that experience when we’ve been watching a nunsploitation film and wondered, “What collision between a religious conscience and libertinism does this genre represent?  How does it relate to the individual and collective conscience about sex, and what does it have to do with the fact that this allegedly medieval nun is wearing nail-polish and sporting a navel-piercing?”

Reflections on the nunsploitation genre, sex, Catholicism, guilt, French literature, Freud, and conscience.

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Stop Teaching Good Books Until We Start Reading Them.

Reading the work is not really necessary anymore for this curriculum that was designed long ago when the only way to experience the text was to live with it. A twenty minute Google search now can give the diligent student more information about the book than the professor has. It's a different world. We have a different mind. The curriculum was established a long time ago before some enormous shifts in that mind came into being.

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Teaching Literary Analysis, Scripture, & The Very Odd Case of Exodus 4:24-26

To read the story theologically either leaves God lacking in omniscience (which I’m fine with but think most Christians will not be fine with); or random as hell. It leaves the Faithful groping vainly for some explanation that doesn’t create more questions than it answers.

But if you simply let the writer play by his own rules, and not the rules that demand the God of Exodus 4 conform to our needs and desires for him, we’re in decent shape, and thinking a lot more like Hebrews and a lot less like the rational, unpoetical creatures we tend to be.

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