Loving Yusef: Conceptual Travels from Present to Past by Mieke Bal (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 195 between essays across the different sections are at least as strong as those within a section. For example, Dawn Llewellyn's critique of third-wave feminism builds on Heather Walton's assessment of 70's and 80's second-wave feminism; the work of Katherine Moody and Maria Beatrice Bittarello reminds us of the research possibilities into the implications for theology of the Internet; Ursula King, Raana Bokhari, and Maria Alvarez write about the postcolonial experience of women; and Anthony Reddies essay on establishing a jazz hermeneutic would sit happily with the explorations of art, architecture, and cinema in the concluding section. The fluidity of the ideas of spirituality and the sacred is confirmed by this cross referencing, illustrating just how difficult it is, using the words of the editors, to pause and frame, even momentarily, ideas of spirituality, but at the same time how creative and stimulating a process it can be to try. It is a collection that succeeds in opening up new ways of thinking about sacred texts and, with the rise of fundamentalism, we are reminded of the need for a view of religious thought that is critical and open to other perspectives. Lyn J. Poole Roehampton University Loving Yusef: Conceptual Travels from Present to Past. By Mieke Bal. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. ISBN-lO 0-226-03587-5. Pp. xiv + 250. (paper) $22.50. The story of Joseph and Potiphar's wife is usually tagged as either a brief, if salacious, folktale in literary discussion of the Bible or presented as a moral admonition. As a child, Mieke Bal encountered the story in Catholic school where students did not read the Biblebut were told Biblestories. Butwhat wasan adolescent girl supposed to learn from this cautionary drama? From this lingering, puzzling memory, Mieke Bal revisits the story, along with several provocative permutations, and launches an ambitious discussion of feminism, fundamentalism, and canonical authority. Mieke Bal is Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences professor, based at the University of Amsterdam. A narratologist by training, Bal has established herself as a free-ranging cultural analyst, and the case studies that often compose the demonstration in her work are drawn from an astonishing array of cultural products-all manner of texts, but also sculpture, painting, film, and museum artifacts. Although she disavows expertise as a biblical scholar, a portion of her productive scholarship has taken up the matter of biblical interpretation, such as Lethal Love: Feminist Readings ofBiblical Love Stories, 1987;Death and Dyssymetry: The Politics of Coherence in the Book ofJudges, 1988; and Murder and Difference: 196 CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE Gender, Genreand Scholarship on Sisera's Death, 1988, 1992. Her work also is much anthologized as part of the feminist canon. In Loving Yusef we find a detailed exploration of reading process over time from an imaginative scholar who is generous in her self-revelation and determined to take us with her on this journey. On display in Loving Yusef are several versions of the "Joseph and Potiphar's wife" story: the Genesis account, Thomas Mann's novel, Joseph and His Brothers (1934), the Qur'an, a Rembrandt etching (1634) and two Rembrandt paintings (both 1655). The fulcrum for her analysis is clearly Mann's novel, however, for she returns throughout the individual chapters for comparative inspiration, and she concludes by celebrating the way in which he was able to "undercut the tight bond between monotheism, monogamy, and masculinity" by creating a "female figure at history's most fraught and violent time" who assists us in thinking about the canon differently (227). Six of her chapters are structured by focusing each one on a specific version of the story, although this quickly develops into a cross-chapter dialogue between the versions. Chapter 2 identifies and analyzes common biblical metaphors in the Genesis account of Joseph and Potiphar's wife (Genesis 39): falling (as in the Fall and its secular counterpart, "falling in love"), seeing (as in "lifted up her eyes" with its further implication of insight), "house" (as in portentous family lineage as well as the prison of women under patriarchal rule), and crying out (as in "lifting up one'svoice" and...