Journeys in the Songscape: Space and the Song of Songs (Hebrew Bible Monographs)

by Christopher Meredith

Publisher:

Sheffield Phoenix Press

, 2017

Overview

The poetic world of the Song of Songs is a famously heady and distortive landscape, filled with bright sunlit rills, nocturnal cityscapes, and fecund bodies laid out like kingdoms. But what does the Song’s use and abuse of spatial relationships tell us about its subject matter, and what do its strange panoramas tell us about literary space more broadly? Directly challenging recent methodological trends in biblical spatial studies, Journeys in the Songscape uses a range of innovative critical tools to explore, map and critique poetic space in the Song of Songs.

Taking the reader on a series of journeys across the Song’s gendered, rural, urban and bodily spaces, Meredith argues that the worlds that spring up between the Song’s lovers are all subtle reimaginings of the space between the biblical page and its own readers, and that at the heart of the Song is a (con)fusion of the dynamics of loving with the experience of reading. Love is at work in the Song, says Meredith, but it is not its subject so much as a sign under which collusions of power, textuality, space and subjectivity labour. The Song’s world speaks not only to sexual relationships, then, but to the structure of language itself; textual spaces do not organize textual meaning but rather image its fundamental instability.

Journeys in the Songscape is a bold new literary treatment of the Song of Songs, but it is also a rethinking of what we mean by the term ‘literary space’, and represents a playful incitement to reconsider how critical tools are put to use in apprehending space as a literary construct.

Key Features

• Uses a range of innovative critical tools to explore, map and critique poetic space in the Song of Songs.
• Gives a bold new literary treatment of the Song of Songs.
• Invites to reconsider how critical tools are put to use in apprehending space as a literary construct.

Contents

• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Chapter 1 Towards a Cartography of Reading
• Notes in the Margins of Other Maps
• Theorists Abroad: Lefebvre and Soja
• Other Cartographies
• Exploring Text and Con-Text with Derrida
• Worlds of Meaning in Benjamin’s Labyrinth
• Advice for the Traveller
• Chapter 2 Undreaming the Song’s World: On Inhabiting a Phantasm
• Holey Ground
• Rude Awakenings, or, The D-Wor(l)d
• Sharing the ‘Bath of Madness’
• Benjamin’s Critical Phantoscope
• On the Scrim: Fluid Continuity in the Song
• Behind the Scrim: The Song’s ‘Space of Two’
• Conjuring Tricks: Turning Sex into Discourse
• Turning Readers into Phantasmagorians
• Turning the Page, Making the Bed
• Chapter 3 Loked Gardens and the City as Labyrinth
• The Green Green Grass of Biblical Academe
• Painting the Roses Red: Gardens as Power
• ‘One Man’s Woman’s Dominion is…’
• The Song’s Garden Revisited
• Gardening as Vajazzling: The Horticulture of ‘Her’
• The City as Labyrinth: On Not-Reading the City
• PhantasCity
• Sex and the City
• Opacity and Transparenc(it)y
• DistURBing, duplicAtiNg
• Freud and the Labyrinthine City
• The City in the Garden in the City
• Chapter 4 Gender, Space and Threshold Magic
• The Line that is not One
• Gendered Space and Irigaray
• Rose and Paradoxical Geography
• The Woman and the Window
• The Man in the Mirror
• Doorstep Sex
• Doors as Scrims
• Derrida’s Hymen
• Threshold/Scrim
• The Elusive Line
• Chapter 5 The Corpus without Organs
• Well-sung Bodies
• Some Assembly Required
• Positing a Prior Body
• The Lover in the Song is Mae West
• Becoming Body
• Sediment as Syntax: The Body without Organs
• Flashes of Tellurian Flesh
• Measuring Territories and Deterritorializations
• Lodged ‘in’ a Boundless Text
• ‘The Patient Labyrinth of Lines Traces…’
• Conlsion: The Songscape, a Task of Reading
• Bibliography
• Index of References
• Index of Authors

Product Details

• Title: Journeys in the Songscape: Space and the Song of Songs (Hebrew Bible Monographs)
• Author: Christopher Meredith
• Series: Hebrew Bible Monographs
• Publisher: Sheffield Phoenix Press
• Print Publication Date: 2017
• Pages: 213
• Language: English
• Resources: 1
• Format: Digital › Logos Reader Edition
• ISBNs: 9781910928233, 1910928232
• Resource ID: LLS:JRNYSSNGSCPSNGS
• Resource Type: Monograph
• Metadata Last Updated: 2025-01-03T15:48:50Z