Item Detail
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33018
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1
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21
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English
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On Signifiers and Signified: Terryl Givens and Twenty-First-Century Book of Mormon Studies
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Journal of Book of Mormon Studies
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January 2022
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31
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Provo, UT
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Maxwell Institute, Brigham Young University
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56-74
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"What I hope to accomplish in a few pages here is relatively simple. My aim is simply to make transparent the stakes of, the argument for, and the motivations behind the best-known claim that Terryl L. Givens makes in his breathtakingly brilliant 2002 book By the Hand of Mormon. I have reference here to the following lines, often quoted:
'Looking at the Book of Mormon in terms of its early uses and reception, it becomes clear that this American scripture has exerted influence within the church and reaction outside the church not primarily by virtue of its substance, but rather by virtue of its manner of appearing, not on the merits of what it says, but what it enacts. Put slightly differently, the history of the Book of Mormon’s place in Mormonism and American religion generally has always been more connected to its status as signifier than signified, or its role as a sacred sign rather than its function as persuasive theology.'
These lines are intrinsically interesting—which I think accounts for them having become the ones for which Givens’s book is best known. But what ultimately motivates my interest in them here is less the particular provocation they contain (although I’ll have much to say about that as I go along!) than the fact that they form part of the core argument of a book that, by all accounts, fashioned a field. By the Hand of Mormon, now twenty years old, more or less singlehanded created the discipline of Book of Mormon studies as we know it today. That’s more than enough reason to return to the promise of its provocations." [Author]
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