3.0

Average Course Rating

This course will juxtapose pertinent key passages of the Bible with modern American texts that are fundamentally biblical in their inspirations, aspirations, proportions, and allusions. We will consider these texts’ attempts, in the face of globalizing and secularizing forces, such as Atlantic slavery and German higher criticism, to affirm, undermine, appropriate, and redirect the authority of the ur-canonical text. Texts may include: Joseph Smith, The Book of Mormon; Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; Harriet Beecher Stowe, Dred; Pauline Hopkins, Hagar’s Daughter; Mark Twain, Diaries of Adam and Eve and Letters from the Earth; Terrence Malick, dir., Tree of Life; Michal Lemberger, After Abel and Other Stories.