Dr. Jacqueline Vayntrub is an assistant Professor of Hebrew Bible at Yale University (Yale presentation):
Dr. Vayntrub’s areas of expertise include the Hebrew Bible, wisdom literature, biblical poetry and poetics, philology, and the history of biblical scholarship. She is especially interested in the Hebrew Bible’s genres and modes of discourse against the broader background of ancient Near Eastern literary production, and its reception in and impact on Western scholarship. Broadly, her work seeks to recover the values of ancient literary culture through the language of the texts and examines how these values were reshaped in their reception.
Dr. Vayntrub has three books in press or in progress. Her first, Beyond Orality: Biblical Poetry on its Own Terms, is forthcoming from Routledge in the Ancient Word series. The book examines the modern scholarly history of theorizing biblical poetry and draws out the unresolved tension between theories about the oral genesis of biblical poetry and evidence that points to the the genre’s written origins.
Her second book, Reframing Biblical Poetry, is under contract with Yale and expected to appear in 2019. A third book, titled Hebrew and Aramaic Writings about the Dead from Judah and Judea, is expected in 2020.
Abstract
During the ATTR seminar in Tromsø 2019, "Orality, Textuality, and Tradition", Vantrub will give a lecture on the following topic:
"The Displaced Voice: Modern Questions of Orality and Ancient Problems of Speech Quotation"
What distinguishes the oral from the written in ancient literary production? How can contemporary scholars examining and attempting to recover the ancient literary past reconstruct what was oral, or even make sense of such an intangible but seemingly ever-present storehouse of compositions, traditions, and literary practices? A distinction between the “oral” and the “written” seems obvious from a modern perspective—a perspective in which the orally circulated literary tradition finds a distinct social location from the published written word. This distinction, or “Great Divide” between the oral and the written has come under closer scrutiny and critique over the past several decades in contemporary scholarship. Yet the strategies for bridging this divide frequently reemphasize or re-inscribe distinct categories, whether by bridging through a muddier “spectrum” between the oral and the written, or replacing the oral with yet a different but analogous and even more under-theorized category of “memory.” But is this distinction between an oral and a written an ancient distinction, or is it simply a modern identification of categories? Readers of Plato’s Phaedrus frequently cite Socrates’ character in that dialogue as seemingly elevating the oral over the written, critiquing the written text as problematically displacing the traditional, living teacher. But what if in identifying an ancient debate between the written and the oral, “text,” on the one hand, and “tradition” on the other, we have missed the point? What if what Plato’s character of Socrates was getting at was not the medium or the technology of writing, but rather, that such a position on writing reveals an ongoing, cross Mediterranean and Near Eastern debate on the authority and authenticity of quoted speech more generally? Identifying the boundaries of modern categories of the “oral” and the “written” and correlated concerns of media, I will show how these categories have obscured a distinct set of questions that were active and observable from ancient text production: What happens to the voice when it is displaced from the embodied context of the living speaker? What are the various strategies available in ancient text production, both in terms of selection of media and rhetorical presentation, to anticipate and counter concerns of diminished value or authenticity of a quoted voice? From a perspective that seeks to recover ancient concerns and distinguish these concerns from those shaped by our inherited intellectual categories and contemporary concerns, I will show how the very identification of the oral and the written is a secondary concern of media that has obscured a primary metaphysical question surrounding the fate of words when their living embodied speaker no longer speaks them.
