Biblical fictions: Modern short stories that retell biblical narratives

This dissertation examines biblical fictions: short stories that derive their plot and characters directly from the Bible. These stories are distinguishable from others that use biblical archetypes or allusions but whose basic structure is not formed around a biblical narrative. This dissertation defines this genre and then argues that the short story form enables and shapes specific kinds of responses to biblical texts. It identifies the form of the short story in its use of dramatic structure and point of view. Part I analyzes how modern stories reconfigure biblical narratives through these techniques. Chapter One applies Roland Barthes's structuralist methods to establish how a retelling's plot modifications shape its thematic responses to its source text. Chapter Two uses Wayne Booth's The Rhetoric of Fiction to demonstrate how first-person retellings of the Judas story can either challenge or affirm the norms of the gospels through the device of a fallible narrator. Part II argues that a retelling can be read as a commentary on its source text. Chapter Three uses rhetorical criticism to compare Roberta Kalechofsky's "Abraham and Isaac" with Martin Luther's lecture on Genesis 22, which also retells the biblical text, and argues that Luther's theology of Anfechtung necessitates his psychologically redramatizing the Akedah. Chapter Four surveys a wider range of Akedah commentaries including early Jewish and Christian responses, Reformation sermons, Mystery Plays, and compares these with several short stories. This dissertation argues that commentaries and short stories often share a concern with biblical characters' experience of suffering. This approach claims that an exegetical text's paraphrases and bits of invented dialogue constitute a retelling, examines how this retelling relates to its homiletic context, and argues that a complex theological framework often results in rich psychological portraits. However, the use of a subjective, limited point of view---one dominant model for modern short fiction---means that the short story as a form most consistently explores characters through the limitations of their knowledge and rejects everything but the human dimension of the narrative. In so doing it makes the Bible seem more familiar but also more remote from our modern experience.