American Academy of Religion proposal for a panel to discuss Material Scripture

The following is the text of the proposal we turned in this week to the AAR. We are hopeful the committee will pick it up and let us do the panel. Keep fingers crossed.

From well before the advent of movable-type printing techniques, the Holy Bible has been a marketed object. This fact has only become more apparent in recent decades, with the rise of Bibles increasingly tailored to demographics and identity.

This panel will explore the physical forms that Scripture takes, as it is presented to readers in various iterations as a printed artifact. Thus the phrase, “Material Scripture,” describes a practice of inquiry that seeks to examine the culture of mass-market Bibles in North America by analyzing the Bibles themselves.

Raymond Williams’s argument, that “we cannot separate literature and art from other kinds of social practice, in such a way as to make them subject to quite special and distinct laws,” became the kernel for a method of literary criticism known as “cultural materialism.” This method, most visibly applied to the field of Shakespeare studies through the publication of Dollimore and Sinfeld’s Political Shakespeare (1985), has been adopted, and adapted, in recent years by a group of biblical scholars and theologians. Working under a variety of names, including “Iconic Books,” “Material Religion” and “Material Scripture,” these scholars are creating an international dialogue as to the various methodologies and practicalities of this “materialist” approach to biblical criticism.

This panel proposes to draw together several of the active scholars in this growing field of inquiry. We are at a point where it is appropriate that our discussions have a wider level of participation and become more public. Thus we are proposing this panel as a forum for a series of differing but complementary examples of “materialist” approaches to scripture.

A mass-produced Bible is both highly designed and, to an ever-increasing degree, a “designer” object. Published Bibles that reflect the demographics of certain aspects of American culture and lifestyle preferences are becoming prevalent in the marketplace, and this trend is not necessarily well addressed by the current methods of biblical criticism. In this panel, Brent Plate, Timothy Beal, and David Dault will offer varying perspectives on a more “materialist” approach to the printed Bible. These explorations of the physicality and genealogy of printed Bibles open up avenues of ideological and theological critique that stretch far back into the history of modern versions of Scripture and into the history of Western print culture itself. Dori Parmenter will respond, and James Watts will chair the proceedings.

The panelists, and their projects, are as follows:

S. Brent Rodriguez Plate (Hamilton College), “Looking at Words” – Typeface and page design matters. The matter (i.e., materiality and thus visuality) of words is as important as the semantics of them. “The Word” in Gothic font means one thing. “The Word” in Helvetica means something quite different. The presentation includes two key points. First, printed words are images, and the so-called Word-Image split ignores the visuality of script, typeface, and layout. Second, interpretation is emotional and affective. There can then be no clear-cut distinction between the semantic dimensions of texts and the iconic and performative dimensions. The rationality of semantics is not separable from the experiential appearance of words. They impact us emotionally, rationally, and, usually, subliminally.

Timothy K. Beal (Case Western Reserve University), “The Materiality of the Bible as Icon” – This multimedia presentation will incorporate a series of cultural representations of the Bible. The initial part of the presentation will involve a montage of images from film and video that demonstrate how the physical presence of the Bible in such representations can function in a totemic or iconic fashion. A brief theoretical reflection upon and discussion of the montage will follow. In this discussion, Beal will examine how the “cultural iconicity” of the Bible seems to be able to contain the plural materialities of Scripture — and how far that iconicity can be stretched to include new and radically different material forms.

David Dault (Christian Brothers University), “From Cultural Materialism to Material Scripture: Developing a Functional Methodology” – This paper will take a step back from the practices of material criticism represented by the first two papers, and offer an analysis of the developing process of material biblical criticism. “Material Scripture” will be presented as an ethically based ideological critique of the practice of"embedding" theologies and hermeneutic guidance into the visual and paratextual corpus of published Bibles, and some initial methodologies for its practice will be identified.

Response to the presentations will come from Dori Parmenter (Spalding University), and the session will be chaired by James Watts (Syracuse University), both of whom have worked in developing the “Iconic Scriptures” project, based at Syracuse University, which has approached a similar range of concerns with a different set of methodologies and assumptions. The inclusion of this alternative approach will, it is hoped, lead to a rich and generative discussion of the wider issues at stake in these disparate approaches to scripture.
Abstract

A mass-produced Bible is both highly designed and, to an ever-increasing degree, a “designer” object. Published Bibles that reflect the demographics of certain aspects of American culture and lifestyle preferences are becoming prevalent in the marketplace, and this trend is not necessarily well addressed by the current methods of biblical criticism. In this panel, Brent Plate, Timothy Beal, and David Dault will offer varying perspectives on a more “materialist” approach to the printed Bible. These explorations of the physicality and genealogy of printed Bibles open up avenues of ideological and theological critique that stretch far back into the history of modern versions of Scripture and into the history of Western print culture itself. Dori Parmenter will respond and James Watts will chair the session.