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Mark Sneed, An Obituary for “Wisdom Literature”: The Birth, Death, and Intertextual Reintegration of a Biblical Corpus. By Will Kynes, The Journal of Theological Studies, Volume 71, Issue 1, April 2020, Pages 303–306, https://doi.org/10.1093/jts/flaa023
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Kynes’s argument is relatively simple. Because the genre or categorization ‘Wisdom Literature’, consisting of the books Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Job, cannot be detected before the nineteenth century, then it must be mistaken. In fact, he argues that this categorization is tainted ideologically since the Germans who created it were naturally drawn to a type of literature that avoided typically Jewish characteristics (precursors of Nazi thinking?). Kynes’s solution? To abandon the notion of genre (he only gives lip service to the concept, eviscerating its meaning and importance) and instead embrace intertextuality.
To pause for further reflection on this genre issue: on the one hand, Kynes says that genres are necessary because they delimit the number of intertextual possibilities, but on the other hand, he eviscerates the concept to mean essentially any perceived intertextual links between texts without consideration of an authorial role (pp. 109–16). This means there are no controls! Kynes compares genres to humans perceiving constellations in the night sky (p. 113). But how would this be analogous to an author who draws on an established pattern to compose a work and who expects his readers to be already familiar with it?
