AKMA’s Random Thoughts

A Lot to Do

I know many of the points I want to make in the postmodernism article, and I know that 5,000 words wont’t be the problem; the problem will be the first paragraph. I just can’t figure out the way I want to address the matter.

I’ll be working with 1 Corinthians 1:14-16, where Paul starts out by claiming that he hadn’t baptized any of the Corinthians, then excepts Crispus and Gaius, then acknowledges that he had forgotten “the household of Stephanas,” and admits that he doesn’t know whether he baptized anyone else. This will give me a specimen of biblical discourse that can illustrate interpretive problems with totalizing discourse, foundationalism. mystification, identity, and probably others that don’t come to mind at the moment.

I first thought about doing a plain old step-by-step introduction to postmodern analysis: “This is what ‘mystification’ means, this is who writes about it, and this is what it looks like in the analysis of 1 Corinthians.” After a few moments’ thought, that seemed too unbearably pedestrian. I considered writing a plain exegetical essay about the passage, with a postmodern commentary on what I was writing ina separate column on the right-hand side of the page. I thought about writing the essay as a letter to the scholar who’s editing the collection. Nothing is working, though; much as I have material to back up the essay, I don’t have a frame within which (or “outside of which” or “around which” or whatever) to situate the exposition.