Untying the Knot: On Riddles and Other Enigmatic Modes

by Galit Hasan-Rokem, David Shulman

Overview

This book collects eighteen previously unpublished essays on the riddle—a genre of discourse found in virtually every human culture.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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780195101867
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	11/28/1996
Pages:	344
Product dimensions:	6.38(w) x 9.50(h) x 1.09(d)
Lexile:	1350L (what's this?)

About the Author

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

Table of Contents

	Contributors	ix
I	General and Theoretical
1	Introduction	3
2	Riddles and Their Use	10
3	Traps of Trans-formation: Theoretical Convergences between Riddle and Ritual	37
4	"I'll Give You Three Guesses": The Dynamics of Genre in the Riddle Tale	62
II	Hebrew Riddles
5	Toward a Theory of the Literary Riddle	81
6	"Spinning Threads of Sand": Riddles as Images of Loss in the Midrash on Lamentations	109
7	A King, a Queen, and the Riddle Between: Riddles and Interpretation in a Late Midrashic Text	125
III	Enigmatic Modes in India
8	The Yaksa's Questions	151
9	When Is a Riddle Not a Riddle? Some Comments on Riddling and Related Poetic Devices in Classical Sanskrit	168
10	Why an Allama Poem Is Not a Riddle: An Anthological Essay	179
11	Texture and Authority: Telugu Riddles and Enigmas	191
12	Enigmas of Sexual Masquerade in Hindu Myths and Tales	208
IV	Chinese Riddling
13	Riddle and Enigma in Chinese Civilization	227
14	Riddles in The Dream of the Red Chamber	237
V	Notes from the West
15	One Voice and Many Legs: Oedipus and the Riddle of the Sphinx	255
16	Myth as Enigma: Cultural Hermeneutics in Late Antiquity	271
17	Squaring the Circle	284
18	Connecting through Riddles, or The Riddle of Connecting	294
	Afterword	316
	Author Index	321
	Subject Index	325

Editorial Reviews

"A big plus is that these well-written essays are generally accessible to upper-level college students, as well as to graduate students and researchers."—Choice

"...the issue of existential expressivity has been wonderfully illuminated in these essays, and for that scholars and curious lay readers will be grateful."—Magill's Literary Annual 1997

"...the intellectual "edge" of the volume and of the individual studies remains as sharp as ever. Untying the Knot is a significant contribution to the scholarship of riddles and related enigmas."—Anthropological Linguistics

From the Publisher