Chiasmus in Literature

Membership in the National Association of Scholars and subscription to the NAS web services never disappoints but sometimes surprises. When I opened today's e-mail packet from NAS I was surprised to see the following, which, of course, resonates deeply with me as one whose scholarly concentration is on biblical literature and theology. Take note of the "Ask a Scholar" feature,

Ask a Scholar: Pericope and Chiasm

By Todd D. Moore

Dear Ask a Scholar,

Can a pericope have more than one possibility of a chiasm?

- Jose Munoz, Seventh Day Adventist Theological Seminary

Answered by Todd D. Moore, staff scientist in commercialization at Merck & Co., Inc. He received a bachelor of science in biology from Delaware Valley College, an additional bachelor of science in Bible and pastorology from Pillsbury College, and a master’s in Biblical studies from Biblical Theological Seminary. He has lectured extensively on Biblical subjects at churches in the Bucks County, PA area. His website features a growing collection of chiastic structures.

Yes, but first a few definitions are in order so that everyone understands what we are discussing.

In literary or rhetorical analysis, a “pericope” is a set of sentences or verses that forms one coherent and self-contained unit. Such a unit is normally evident as a paragraph, episode, or story that contributes to the overall composition. The word itself is transliterated from the Greek, perikoph, referring to the general form of a passage or section. (Its plural, by the way, is “pericopae.”) A good illustration is the “Pericope Adulterae” - the pericope of the adulteress in John 7:53-8:11. This famous episode from the life of Jesus is debated among textual critics as to whether it was actually present as part of the original writing of the author (since this pericope is not found in some of the oldest manuscript evidence).

“Chiasm” (short for “Chiasmus”) is a figure of speech, a form of parallelism, derived from the likeness to the crossing in the Greek letter chi, X. In this figure, the order of the literary units is reversed from one half of the compositional structure to the other. The units (which may be words, sentences, paragraphs, or themes) are composed such that they correspond to one another, but in inverted order. The smallest, most basic, chiastic structure looks like ABBA in form. An example of this is Matthew 7:6 where we should understand that it is dogs that attack and pigs that trample:

A. Do not give dogs what is holy,

B. and do not throw your pearls before pigs,

B’ lest they trample them underfoot

A’ and turn to attack you.

Read the whole article.

Peter Wood, NAS President, to Speak at Northwestern College

Peter Wood, President of the National Association of Scholars (of which I have been a member for several years), will be speaking at Northwestern College, Saint Paul, Minnesota as a guest lecturer in the Faith & Thought Lecture Series. The event will be held on November 9, 2010 at 7:30 p.m. in the beautiful Nazareth Chapel.

Peter Wood, formerly Provost of King's College (NYC), is author of highly acclaimed Diversity: The Invention of a Concept, and of A Bee in the Mouth: Anger in America Today.

Members of NAS, especially in Wisconsin and Minnesota, please consider this an invitation to hear our national president. His lecture is titled, "What's Wrong with Diversity? The Reckless Career of a Mistaken Ideal." This is  the issue captured and expressed so well in his first book and which is an issue frequently addressed by Peter Wood and the NAS staff with here.

Update: 09/24/2010

Tyranny on America's Private College Campus, Part 2

Professor Paquette Responds

In April, Hamilton College American history professor Robert Paquette published an NAS article describing how the campus left insulates itself and bullies dissenters. As evidence, he cited the case of his former colleague Chris Hill, a libertarian teacher/scholar who was eliminated early from consideration for a tenure-track position.

A few weeks later, Hamilton's Dean of the Faculty Joseph Urgo wrote Paquette a letter reprimanding him, demanding that the article be removed from the NAS website, and denying Paquette the right to serve on faculty search committees.

National media took notice of the controversy this summer. Mark Bauerlein has a mult-part series at The Chronicle on questions surrounding the incident, and Scott Jaschik published "When Faculty Aren't Supposed to Talk" at Inside Higher Ed.

Yesterday Professor Robert Paquette responded to the controversy in a new article, "Dictatorships and Double Standards, Part II."

Tyranny on America's Private College Campus

Hamilton College to Prof. Paquette: Shut Up

A faculty member has landed in hot water for an article he published on the NAS website. In April, Hamilton College history professor Robert Paquette published “Dictatorships and Double Standards” on the National Association of Scholars website. A few weeks after the article appeared, Hamilton’s Dean of the Faculty Joseph Urgo wrote Paquette a letter reprimanding him, demanding that the article be removed from the NAS website, and denying Paquette the right to serve on faculty search committees.

This is the first instance we know of in which an academic official has sought to censor the NAS website—so naturally we are taking a keen interest in the proceedings. We have of course not removed Paquette’s article. (As a small act of defiance, we intend to link it frequently.) Paquette has also promised us a “Dictatorships and Double Standards, Part 2.”

We aren’t the only ones taking notice of Hamilton College’s heavy-handed response. Emory University professor Mark Bauerlein wrote about the letter in a Chronicle of Higher Education blog post (afternoon update: "An Episode at Hamilton, Part 2") and has promised more to come. Bauerlein cites Urgo’s ultimatum to Paquette whom he prohibited from serving on faculty search committees “until and unless your colleagues can convince the Dean’s office that you will adhere to College policies regarding faculty recruitment.”

Scott Jaschik took up the story in an article on Inside Higher Ed, “When Faculty Aren’t Supposed to Talk.” Jaschik asks, “But what is a breach [of confidence] and can a breach be punished?” He quotes Paquette saying that “information in my NAS piece was either obvious or a matter of public record long before I wrote the piece.”

Malleus Maleficarum

What’s all this about? Paquette’s article pretty much speaks for itself, but the short form is this: Paquette discusses the tyranny of intellectual majorities on campus who use “slash and burn” techniques to eliminate the representation of disfavored views. His case in point is the treatment of Christopher Hill, a junior faculty member in the history department at Hamilton who was sidelined at the very first stage of the search when a tenure track position opened up. Hill is a self-described libertarian and Paquette cited evidence that diversity preferences and suspicions about Hill’s political views played a role in that adverse decision.

Read the whole NAS article by Peter Wood.  

Below are the final two paragraphs from Robert Paquette's NAS article.

 

Dictatorships and Double Standards

Instead of trying to see the world better or more truly as it is by renouncing ideology, campus radicals claim that everyone has it, only theirs is superior to yours because it is enlisted in the service of the downtrodden. Ideologues, like ideologies, insulate themselves from testing. Try vigorously interrogating members of the diversity cartel in a departmental meeting as to why the standards by which they are judging a Professor Hill or some other poor chap appear not to have been applied in their own case or in previous cases involving ideological soul-mates. Pointing out the inconsistencies yielded by the slipperiness of situational ethics might just get you frog-marched to the dean’s office to face demands for “personnel action.” Your conveniently sensitive colleagues, after all, having worked endlessly on committees and at faculty meetings to install the apparatus of intimidation, can now charge you with having created with a sharp retort or pointed criticism “a hostile environment.” Self-censorship, let it be stressed, stretches on many college campuses from faculty, to staff, to students. The best and brightest conservative students in thinking about viable career options don’t forget what they saw on campus or what they endured in classrooms as undergraduates.

Colleges, even elite private liberal arts colleges, exist by a social contract invested by public faith. If the crises of our time worsen, the populist upsurge represented by the Tea Partiers may swell. Well might they begin to fix a penetrating gaze on the state of this country’s institutions of higher education. I, for one, would welcome sanitizing light.

Robert L. Paquette is Publius Virgilius Rogers professor of American history at Hamilton College and co-founder of the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization.

Camille Paglia and Peter Wood of NAS Agree?

Here's a superb read by Peter Wood of National Association of Scholars, Paglia’s Scimitar, taking off from Paglia's "Too Late for Obama to Turn It Around?. Wood cites Paglia:

But affluent middle-class Democrats now seem to be complacently servile toward authority and automatically believe everything party leaders tell them. Why? Is it because the new professional class is a glossy product of generically institutionalized learning? Independent thought and logical analysis of argument are no longer taught. Elite education in the U.S. has become a frenetic assembly line of competitive college application to schools where ideological brainwashing is so pandemic that it's invisible. The top schools, from the Ivy League on down, promote "critical thinking," which sounds good but is in fact just a style of rote regurgitation of hackneyed approved terms ("racism, sexism, homophobia") when confronted with any social issue. The Democratic brain has been marinating so long in those clichés that it's positively pickled (emphasis added).

Wood comments,

Independent thought and critical analysis of argument just cannot live in the same company with a curriculum in which the central premise is that all of cultural and social life can be reduced to the privileged oppressing the weak. When the terms of analysis are reduced to the race-gender-class triad, real analysis must stop. Independent ideas are instantly categorized as “bias” of one sort or another, while conformity to the stale “theory” is routinely praised as “independent thinking.” In contemporary elite education, all the intellectual exits have been blocked.

The “invisibility” that Paglia mentions is ensured by a curriculum that simply ignores what cannot be conveniently comprehended under the current ideological terms. Moreover, this has been going on for decades. Colleges can now pretty safely assume that candidates for faculty appointment who have attended American graduate schools have never seriously studied anything outside the charmed circle of ideological conformity. They need not be intentionally biased. They simply have no concept that dissent from the prevailing academic orthodoxies can arise from anything other than deep-rooted antipathy to manifestly wholesome ideas. Paglia spots this self-approval forever patting itself on the back:

The top schools, from the Ivy League on down, promote "critical thinking," which sounds good but is in fact just a style of rote regurgitation of hackneyed approved terms ("racism, sexism, homophobia") when confronted with any social issue.

In the current academic regime, all sorts of terms turn out to have false bottoms. “Diversity” sounds good until you realize that it means “enforced conformity”—conformity to the roles assigned to individuals as members of identity groups, and conformity to the underlying view of America as an enduringly unjust society. “Sustainability” sounds good until you realize it means “giving up individual liberty so an unelected elite can decide how best to distribute resources.” The university today spins out these terms by the dozens. “Inclusive excellence” means “there is no such thing as excellence, just different preferences among diverse groups.”