1. The Ghost In Hamlet
The book I chose to respond to is "The Prophetic Imagination" by Walter Brueggemann (1973). I chose this book because the Prophetic is a topic of great interest to me. I think that Brueggemann communicates skillfully with his audience, describing the task of the Prophet. He presents a study of the prophet as a cause of change in the face of an unruly power structure that exploits the weak. He uses Moses as an example of the model prophet, and uses pharaoh and his government as the power elite.
In the book Brueggemann talks about Moses offering an alternative consciousness of a God who answers the cries of the oppressed. Brueggemann communicates that Israel's prophets were really trying to do two things; criticize the church and energize or comfort the afflicted. On one hand the prophets tried to disturb the status quo, and question the order of things. They would act like skeptics. On the other hand the prophets tried to generate hope, affirm identity, and create a new future. He points out that consumerism has co-opted the American church to the point that it has little power. He says, "The task of prophetic ministry is to nurture, nourish, and evoke a consciousness and perception alternative to the consciousness and perception of the dominant culture around us." Brueggemann communicates that Christ's crucifixion is the ultimate prophetic criticism.
Prophetic imagination in essence is imagining something before completion, or before it happens. Brueggemann says this is done by poetry, lyric and future fantasy. The example for prophetic imagination is for people who "have been robbed of the courage or power to think an alternative thought" (44). The book seems to make light of the prophetic, almost saying that prophets just think things up. I think that Brueggemann is only trying to make a point about the necessity of the prophetic. To be prophetic means to break with the majority, to imagine and come up with a different reality, to challenge assumptions of society, to break through the numbness of comfortable self-sufficiency, and surrender to God's control.
In my mind after reading and researching all the information, the Medo - Persian Empire was a kingdom with great prophetic value before and during the Intertestament Period. ... It did not rise until some fifty to sixty years after Nebuchadnezzar's dream, and Daniel's interpretation, that would mean that the Kingdom had great prophetic value before the visions. ... Daniel had visions that were of prophetic value, given to him by God. ... I ask this question, because in my mind it seems as though Darius just appeared almost like a figure in the author imagination. ... In the four...
This is the longest and most powerful, an angry prophetic lament. ... The second part is part Old Testament hellfire ranting and Ginsberg begins by asking "What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their and imagination?" ... Moloch is an ancient deity to whom children were sacrificed, just as the "rains and imagination" of the present generation are devoured by a cruel and jealous social system. ...
Harsh Reality In Shakespeare's Hamlet, Hamlet is able to slowly open his eyes to the harsh realities of the world to which he was once unable to see. Hamlet is plucked out of his innocence and thrown into a world where he discovers true evil, deceiving appearance, and the insignificance of one's e...
(I.iii.50) The three witches, with their "prophetic greeting" (I.iii.78) gear Macbeth's drive for power. ... Even his soliloquies, notable for magniloquence and marked by voluptuous word-painting, show more the stages of his corruption than its causes - the need for action to cover his lack of poise in awaiting developments and the need to stifle the moral imagination that enables him to foresee the consequences of his actions. ...
Simon is depicted as a compassionate, wise, mature, visionary, prophetic character with a will of goodness to help the other boys. ... In addition to being just a figment of Simon's imagination, the Lord of the Flies has enough demonic power to control him and to be in charge of Jack's tribe. ... While the prophetic child is tragically beaten upon, he cries out "something about a dead man on a hill" (Golding 152). ...
"She soon came to regard him as her dearest "earthly friend," and for purposes of poetry created in his image the "lover" whom she was never to know except in imagination" (Hart 224). ... Dickinson's ability to express her ideas of spirituality and her own experiences of human suffering were provided by her exposure to the Judeo-Christian prophetic tradition. " she translates conventional Christianity into other terms, often those of the emotions or of her physiological experience" (Doriani 5). ...
