Meir Sternberg
Meir Sternberg (born October 3, 1944) is an Israeli literary critic and biblical scholar. He is Artzt Professor of Poetics and Comparative Literature at Tel Aviv University. Along with Robert Alter and Adele Berlin, Sternberg is one of the most prominent practitioners of a literary approach to the Bible.[1]
Work
Sternberg made an important contribution to narrative theory in his book Expositional Modes and Temporal Ordering in Fiction, first published in Johns Hopkins University Press (1978) and later in Indiana University Press (1993). In his book Sternberg systematically explores how the order of information offered by the literary text creates for readers effects such as curiosity, suspense and surprise by analyzing examples that range from Homer's Odyssey to selected modern novels. Sternberg's contribution in this book to Narratology, with its emphasis on the effects of the literary texts on readers, can be seen as part of Reader-response criticism.[2][3]
Sternberg is best known for his 1985 book The Poetics of Biblical Narrative. Sternberg argues that the Bible is a "foolproof composition": any reader who reads the Bible in "good faith" will get the point of what is written.
Sternberg was the editor of the academic journal Poetics Today from 1994 to 2016. He was awarded the Israel Prize in 1996, for his contributions to literary theory.
References
- ISBN 9780802828163.
- JSTOR 1770307.
- JSTOR 514193.
- ISBN 9780814731888. Retrieved 5 October 2014.
- ISBN 9780820478289. Retrieved 5 October 2014.
- ^ R. Christopher Heard, "Narrative Criticism and the Hebrew Scriptures," Restoration Quarterly 38.1 (1996), 33.
- ^ J. Daniel Hays, "An Evangelical Approach to Old Testament Narrative Criticism," Bibliotheca Sacra 166 (2009), 7.
- ISBN 9780826414328. Retrieved 3 April 2016.