Episode 2: Anna Akhmatova's "Lot's Wife"

The Russian poet Anna Akhmatova's poem "Lot's Wife" draws its central images from the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. The story's unnamed, enigmatic character, Lot's Wife, who becomes a "pillar of salt," has fascinated rabbis, painters, and poets from antiquity to the Renaissance and into the modern world. This episode explores the poem and its source story, while exploring irresistible adjacent issues like homosexuality, the historicity of the Bible, and the role of storytelling in the construction of national identity.

Works Cited and Consulted: 

Alter, Robert. The Art of Biblical Narrative. New York: Basic Books, 1981.

Derrida, Jacques and Dufourmantelle, Anne. Of Hospitality: Anne Dufourmantelle Invites Jacques Derrida to Respond. Trans. Rachel Bowlby. Stanford University Press, 2000.

Gagnon, Roger A. J. The Bible and Homosexual Practice: Texts and Hermeneutics. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2002.

Gallagher, Lowell. Sodomscapes: Hospitality in the Flesh. Fordham University Press, Scholarship Online, 2017.

Goldberg,  Jonathan. Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities. New York: Fordham University Press, 2010.

Harries, Martin. Forgetting Lot’s Wife: On Destructive Spectatorship. Fordham University Press, 2007.

Kearney, Richard. Strangers, Gods, and Monsters: Approaching Otherness. London and New York: Routledge, 2003

Koplowitz-Breier, Anat . “‘Turn it over and over’: American Jewish Women’s Poetry on Lot’s Wife. Literature & Theology, Vol. 34. No. 2, June 2020: pp. 206–227.

Oard, Brian. “The Necessity of Looking Back.” in Beauty and Terror: Essays on the Power of Painting. Online Publication, https://sites.google.com/site/beautyandterror/

Ostriker, Alicia. The Nakedness of the Fathers: Biblical Visions and Revisions. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997 

Still, Judith. Derrida and Hospitality: Theory and Practice. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012.