Date Published:

Abstract:

Is there a “basic” meaning to a text? Or is every text ambiguous from the start? Insofar as a foundational work may be considered to be multivalent in meaning, by what principles do interpreters assess its “literal” sense? How broadly do they construe its scope — and what are the conceptual and historical implications of such perspectives? From antiquity to modernity, far-reaching changes in approach to literality are not just efforts to “figure out” words. Aiming to formulate relationships between words and events, they are efforts to figure out the world.

June 2024: Prof. Jon Whitman is a medievalist whose work explores the interplay of intellectual and imaginative changes from antiquity to the modern period.  He received his B.A. (summa cum laude) from Columbia University; his B.Phil. from the University of Oxford; and his A.M. and Ph.D. from Harvard University.  Long affiliated with the English Department of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he is now emeritus, he directed for many years the University’s Center for Literary Studies.  His publications include Allegory: The Dynamics of an Ancient and Medieval Technique (co-published in 1987 by Oxford University Press and Harvard University Press) and two collaborative studies under his editorship: Interpretation and Allegory: Antiquity to the Modern Period (published in 2000 by Brill), and Romance and History: Imagining Time from the Medieval to the Early Modern Period (published in 2015 by Cambridge University Press).

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