The claim, so often heard, that the Bible has exerted a stronger influence on Western literary culture than any other book is a truism. What that influence actually consists of, however, remains largely unknown. In the introduction to his first book on the Bible and literature (The Great Code, 1982), Northrop Frye asserted that students of literature have almost no knowledge of the Bible. He therefore offered elective courses aimed at providing students with sufficient knowledge of the Bible so that they would be able to recognize its influence on literary culture. Frye soon came to realize that the Bible’s influence did not consist merely in providing Western literary culture with an exceptionally rich repertoire of stories and motifs, but that it represented its “great code”, and that the structure of biblical narratives and their imagery was deeply connected with the conventions and genres of Western literature. The Bible therefore also influenced the very understanding of literature and contributed to a certain de-Hellenization of literary studies. Before Frye’s intensive engagement with biblical narrative structures and imagery, Erich Auerbach, with his famous book Mimesis: Dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der abendländischen Literatur (1946), had already encouraged a more intensive literary-critical study of the Bible. Since then, many authors have begun to view the Bible as a vast corpus of narrative techniques, rhetorical tropes and figures, and poetic inventions that should be subjected to more precise analysis. In addition to narratological and rhetorical studies, other literary-theoretical models were also applied, most notably New Criticism, structuralism and Russian formalism. All of this led to meticulous analyses, primarily of biblical prose, by scholars such as Robert Alter, Adele Berlin, Meir Sternberg, Jan Fokkelman, Gabriel Josipovici and others. The Bible suddenly revealed itself as an exceptionally accomplished literary creation. “Readings” of the Bible by Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Umberto Eco, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Lacan, Terry Eagleton, Harold Bloom and others also emerged. The Bible thus once again became essential reading. The aim of the Centre for Bible and Literature is to encourage younger scholars and students to research the influence of the Bible not only on the development of Western literary culture, but also on literary studies, and vice versa: the influence of literary studies and literature itself on the reading of the Bible. In doing so, the Centre will seek to establish connections with domestic and international projects with similar orientations, collect and disseminate newly acquired insights, organize scientific conferences, launch projects, and undertake similar activities.
