Untying the Knot
On Riddles and Other Enigmatic Modes
1st Edition
Published on 28. November 1996
340 pages
978-0-19-535632-8 (ISBN)
Description
This book collects eighteen previously unpublished essays on the riddle--a genre of discourse found in virtually every human culture. Hasan-Rokem and Shulman have drawn these essays from a variety of cultural perspectives and disciplines; linguists, anthropologists, folklorists, and religion and literature scholars consider riddling practices in Hebrew, Finnish, Indian languages, Chinese, and classical Greek. The authors seek to understand the peculiar expressive power of the riddle, and the cultural logic of its particular uses; they scrutinize the riddle's logical structure and linguistic strategies, as well as its affinity to neighboring genres such as enigmas, puzzles, oracular prophecy, proverbs, and dreams. In this way, they begin to answer how riddles relate to the conceptual structures of a particular culture, and how they come to represent a culture's cosmology or cognitive map of the world. More importantly, these essays reveal the human need for symbolic ordering--riddles being one such form of cultural ritual.
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Persons
Poet and Essayist, Galit Hasan-Rokem is Professor of Folklore at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. David Shulman is Professor of Indian Studies and Comparative Religion at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Content
- Intro
- CONTENTS
- Contributors
- I General and Theoretical
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Riddles and Their Use
- 3 Traps of Trans-formation: Theoretical Convergences between Riddle and Ritual
- 4 "I'll Give You Three Guesses": The Dynamics of Genre in the Riddle Tale
- II Hebrew Riddles
- 5 Toward a Theory of the Literary Riddle
- 6 "Spinning Threads of Sand": The Dynamics of Genre in the Riddle Talei n the Midrash on Lamentations
- 7 A King, a Queen, and the Riddle Between: Riddles and Interpretations in a Late Midrashic Text
- III Enigmatic Modes in India
- 8 The Yaksa's Questions
- 9 When Is a Riddle Not a Riddle? Some Comments on Riddling and Related Poetic Devices in Classical Sanskrit
- 10 Why an Allama Poem Is Not a Riddle: An Anthological Essay
- 11 Texture and Authority: Telugu Riddles and Enigmas
- 12 Enigmas of Sexual Masquerade in Hindu Myths and Tales
- IV Chnese Riddling
- 13 Riddle and Enigma in Chinese Civilization
- 14 Riddles in The Dream of the Red Chamber
- V Notes from the West
- 15 One Voice and Many Legs: Oedipus and the Riddle of the Sphinx
- 16 Myth as Enigma: Cultural Hermeneutics in Late Antiquity
- 17 Squaring the Circle
- 18 Connecting through Riddles, or The Riddle of Connecting
- Afterword
- Author Index
- Subject Index
