Since the seventeenth century when the King James Version (1611) was made available to those who could read its sonorous phrases, the Bible has contributed much to the taste in literature for all writers and readers. The seventeenth-century prose of the King James Bible is the most eloquent, though far from the most accurate, biblical translation into English. Appreciating its beauty makes it possible to understand its influence on literature in English. The King James Version of the Bible is not only the great source book of spiritual experience of English-speaking peoples, but it is also a treasury of plain, pungent words and muscular phrases, beautiful in themselves and with long and enduring associations. If you want to be a good writer and a good reader of poetry and fiction, you need to read the Bible, for it is a seamless web of myth and metaphor, regardless of its authority.

This course is designed to teach students to appreciate biblical literature (both narratives and poetry) as literary wholes, complete with internal dynamics, ironies and paradoxes, interaction among characters and scenes, thematic and imagistic patterns, and formal structures. The use of the Bible by poets and novelists includes allegory, allusion, narrative patterning, parody, and critical comment. Creation stories begin a text replete with murder, flood, curses, witches, prophets, kings, and Christ figures. Many have their source in the Bible. Our mutual task will be to find and analyze distinctions between and likenesses among biblical narratives and short stories and novels, to recognize the Bible as literature, and to identify the various uses of biblical modes, figures, ideas, and echoes in English and American literature. As Alfred, Lord Tennyson, put it over 100 years ago: "Bible reading is an education in itself."

Course requirements include at least two papers, an oral presentation (alone or with others), and a final examination, along with regular and informed participation in lively class discussions. In additions to selections from the Bible, the course will include plays, short stories, novels, and some poetry. A partial list follows:
Short stories by Hawthorne, Twain, Chekhov, Gide, Singer, Coover;
Novels by Hardy, Hensen, and Morrison;
Robert Frost, A Masque of Reason and A Masque of Mercy
Archibald MacLeish, J.B.
Essays by Northrop Frye, Robert Alter, Phyllis Trible, Frank Kermode, and others.