Job well done

My course on Job and the Arts is almost done. Students are presenting final projects in the discussion sections this week, highlights from which weill be shared with the whole class in next week's final session. So today was my last time to lecture. As I've done before I let a collage remind them of all we've worked through together, and instead ran a final google.doc and discussed three "new frontiers" in Job reception, in biblical studies, political theory and literature. 

The first was Edward Greenstein's stark new translation of the Book of Job - the one which ends with a non-plussed Job declaring 

As a hearing by the ear I have heard you. / And now my eye has seen you. // That is why I am fed up; / I take pity on "dust and ashes." 

The second was William Connolly's framing of his new politics for the Anthropocene in terms of a Jobian "myth" which might accommodate even secularists under its banner of a "dissonant world of multiple forces that do not carry special entitlements or guarantees for any beings" and yet merits a nihilism-defying attachment: 

Its energies solicit our embrace in part because we and it are made of the same stuff.

The last was the scene from NoViolet Bulawayo's novel We Need New Names where the protagonist is reconciled with her father (dying of AIDS, timely on World AIDS day) as children dance a song about the suffering of Job with him:  

Jobho makes you call out to heaven even though you know God is occupied with better things and will not even look your way. Jobho makes you point your forefinger to the sky and sing at the top of your voice. We itch and we scratch and we point and we itch again and we fill the shack with song.

"Performing the problem of suffering" indeed!