Ann Banfield - professor in the Department of English at the University of California, Berkeley - is best known for her groundbreaking contributions to narrative theory. Working within the paradigm of generative linguistics, she argued that the language of fiction is characterized by two "unspeakable sentences", i.e., sentences that do not properly occur in the spoken language: the sentence of "pure narration" and the sentence of "represented speech and thought" (style indirect libre or erlebte Rede). More recently, Banfield offered a major reconsideration of the novels of Virginia Woolf and modernism in light of the philosophy of knowledge developed by G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell, and appropriated by Roger Fry in his critical analyses of impressionism and post-impressionism. The essays gathered here pay tribute to Banfield by addressing those disciplines and topics most closely related to her work, including: narrative theory and pragmatics, the philosophy of language and knowledge, generative syntax, meter and phonology, and modernism.

The Archaeology of Ancient Israelite Knowledge reconstructs in carefully researched detail the worldview of the ancient Israelites writers responsible for the Hebrew Bible. What was the role of God in their lives? How did they see the relationship between God, nature, and themselves? Contrary to prevailing scholarly understanding, Robert Kawashima argues that the ancient Israelites saw God in a radically different way than the peoples around them. God no longer interconnected everything-humans, nature-but became seen as sharply separated from nature. Elegantly written and powerfully argued, The Archaeology of Ancient Israelite Knowledge is essential reading for anyone wanting to grasp the Hebrew Bible and the ancient world that gave rise to it.

The Archaeology of Ancient Israelite Knowledge reconstructs in carefully researched detail the worldview of the ancient Israelites writers responsible for the Hebrew Bible. What was the role of God in their lives? How did they see the relationship between God, nature, and themselves? Contrary to prevailing scholarly understanding, Robert Kawashima argues that the ancient Israelites saw God in a radically different way than the peoples around them. God no longer interconnected everything-humans, nature-but became seen as sharply separated from nature. Elegantly written and powerfully argued, The Archaeology of Ancient Israelite Knowledge is essential reading for anyone wanting to grasp the Hebrew Bible and the ancient world that gave rise to it.

Informed by literary theory and Homeric scholarship as well as biblical studies, Biblical Narrative and the Death of the Rhapsode sheds new light on the Hebrew Bible and, more generally, on the possibilities of narrative form. Robert S. Kawashima compares the narratives of the Hebrew Bible with Homeric and Ugaritic epic in order to account for the "novelty" of biblical prose narrative. Long before Herodotus or Homer, Israelite writers practiced an innovative narrative art, which anticipated the modern novelist s craft. Though their work is undeniably linked to the linguistic tradition of the Ugaritic narrative poems, there are substantive differences between the bodies of work. Kawashima views biblical narrative as the result of a specifically written verbal art that we should counterpose to the oral-traditional art of epic. Beyond this strictly historical thesis, the study has theoretical implications for the study of narrative, literature, and oral tradition.

Indiana Studies in Biblical Literature Herbert Marks, General Editor"