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Focuses on a range of Jewish and non-Jewish writers to examine the intersection of Kabbalah, the Jewish mystical tradition, and secular Jewish literatures. Kabbalah and Literature shows how the Jewish mystical tradition contributes to the renewal of literature in a modern, global, and increasingly disconnected age. Kitty Millet explores Kabbalah''s conceptual underpinnings, aesthetic principles, tenets, and signifiers to demonstrate how literature''s absorption of kabbalistic material has altered its ontology, function, and the tasks it sets for itself. Reading writers from Europe and the Americas, Kitty Millet maps how the kabbalist''s desire to "recover Eden" transforms into a latent messianic drive only intuitable through text. Thus it charts a journey of sorts, a migration of Jewish mystical material embedded surreptitiously within text in order to shift ever so slightly at times the range of the literary to encompass an aesthetic vision not easily reducible to the literal, the known, the allegorical, or even the philosophical. In this way, Kabbalah and Literature proposes a novel, intuitive approach, shifting focus away from the Jewish text''s epistemological elements to embrace its "secrets."
List of contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Preliminary Remarks
- Kabbalah in Fiction
- Literature, Mimesis, Fictional Genealogies
- Scholem’s “Metaphysics” of Kabbalah and Literature
- Parsing the Kabbalah in Modern Fiction
Part 1. The Other's Path and the Redemption of Ben Aher
1. Jacob Frank, "Heretic of Kabbalah"
2. Heretics and Heresies of Innovation
3. Heinrich Heine, Poet/Prophet of the "Innovated Text"
4. Kafka, Prophet of Failure
5. Being and Nothingness: The Matter of Golems
Part 2. Letter Phenomenologies of Modernist Kabbalahs
6. Golems of Text and Bruno Schulz's "Interminable Aggadot"
7. The "Absolute Object" in Argentino's Basement
8. Lost Letters
9. "There Must Be Other Songs beyond Mankind"
Conclusion: Literature's Messianic Moments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Kitty Millet is Professor of Comparative Jewish Literatures and Holocaust Studies, as well as Chair of the Department of Jewish Studies, at San Francisco State University, USA. She also is the editor of the Bloomsbury Series, Comparative Jewish Literatures. She is also chairperson of the International Comparative Literature Association (ICLA) research committee on Religion, Ethics, and Literature. Her book, The Victims of Slavery, Colonization, and the Holocaust: A Comparative History of Persecution (Bloomsbury, 2017), analyzes the constitutive side of victimization within three groups, slaves in the Americas, Africans under German colonization, and death camp survivors of the Reinhard camps.
Summary
Focuses on a range of Jewish and non-Jewish writers in Europe and the Americas to examine the intersection of Kabbalah, the Jewish mystical tradition, and secular Jewish literatures.
Foreword
Focuses on a range of Jewish and non-Jewish writers in Europe and the Americas to examine the intersection of Kabbalah, the Jewish mystical tradition, and secular Jewish literatures.
