Writing Jude : the reader, the text, and the author.

This thesis is about the application of modern literary criticism to the epistle of Jude. One of the major questions it asks is "What happens to a text (Jude) when a reader reads it using one of these literary theories?" Or to put it a different way, "What does this way of reading emphasise which may have been neglected, ignored, or treated as irrelevant by other forms of reading?" The answers to these questions have been constructed around three loci: the reader, the text, and the author. Within the chapters constructed around those foci, the issues of power and desire, knowledge and language are brought to the forefront by the methods used for reading Jude. These methods include ideas drawn from reader response criticism, feminism, psychoanalysis, intertextuality, the study of tropes, structuralism, and post-structuralism. These methods and the ideas which they highlight are drawn together to comment on the relationship between the reader, the text, and the author and to accent their access (or lack of it) to desire, power, knowledge, and language. The epistle of Jude becomes an epistle that is about power and desire just as much as it is an epistle about "false teachers" and about a community of people known by the name Beloved.