From Continuity to Contiguity: Toward a New Jewish Literary Thinking (Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture) - Hardcover

Miron, Dan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0804762007 ISBN 13: 9780804762007

Verlag: Stanford University Press, 2010

Inhaltsangabe

Dan Miron—widely recognized as one of the world's leading experts on modern Jewish literatures—begins this study by surveying and critiquing previous attempts to define a common denominator unifying the various modern Jewish literatures. He argues that these prior efforts have all been trapped by the need to see these literatures as a continuum. Miron seeks to break through this impasse by acknowledging discontinuity as the staple characteristic of modern Jewish writing. These literatures instead form a complex of independent, yet touching, components related through contiguity. From Continuity to Contiguity offers original insights into modern Hebrew, Yiddish, and other Jewish literatures, including a new interpretation of Franz Kafka's place within them and discussions of Sholem Aleichem, Sh. Y. Abramovitsh, Akhad ha'am, M. Y. Berditshevsky, Kh. N. Bialik, and Y. L. Peretz.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Dan Miron is Leonard Kay Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He is the author more than thirty volumes of literary scholarship and criticism in Hebrew, Yiddish, English, German, and Russian.

Dan Miron is Leonard kay Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He is the author of more than thirty volumes of literary scholarship and criticism in Hebrew, Yiddish, English, German, and Russian.

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From Continuity to Contiguity

Toward a New Jewish Literary ThinkingBy Dan Miron

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2010 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-6200-7

Contents

Acknowledgments...................................................................................................................ixNote on Transliteration...........................................................................................................xiii1. Prologue: Old Questions; Do They Deserve New Answers?..........................................................................32. The "Old" Jewish Literary Discourse and the Illusion of Israeli Cultural Normalcy..............................................203. Modern Jewish Literary Thinking: The Enlightenment and the Advent of Nationalism...............................................574. The Jewish Literary Renaissance at the Turn of the Nineteenth and the Beginning of the Twentieth Centuries.....................905. The Inter-Bellum Decades: Hebrew...............................................................................................1346. The Inter-Bellum Decades: Yiddish; Issues of Cultural Continuity in Revolutionary Times........................................1717. Vertical and Horizontal Continuities and Discontinuities.......................................................................2048. Dov Sadan's Concept of Sifrut Yisra'el, and Why the "Old" Jewish Literary Discourse Became Irrelevant..........................2469. Jewish Diglossias-Differential and Integral....................................................................................27810. Contiguity: Franz Kafka's Standing Within the Modern Jewish Literary Complex..................................................30311. Contiguity: How Kafka and Sholem Aleichem Are Contiguous......................................................................35112. Conclusion: Toward a New Jewish Literary Thinking.............................................................................403Breathing Through Both Nostrils? Shalom Ya'akov Abramovitsh Between Hebrew and Yiddish............................................421Notes.............................................................................................................................499Index.............................................................................................................................530

Chapter One

Prologue: Old Questions; Do They Deserve New Answers?

What is this thing called (since the 1860s) hasifrut ha'ivrit hakhadasha (the new Hebrew literature)? In what does its "newness" subsist? How does this newness indicate a break from an "old" Hebrew literature? In what did the passage from that "old" literature to the "new" one differ from the normal evolving of other literatures through changes of style, poetics, philosophical underpinnings, and socio-historical circumstances? What justifies the sweeping separation of the new Hebrew literature from the presumably old one, drawing between the two a historical demarcation line that is so much bolder than the lines separating the Italian literary baroque from Italian neoclassicism or English medieval literature from its Renaissance continuation; and that, in spite of the fact that the advent of the new Hebrew literature never involved a linguistic shift as sharp and far reaching as the one that separates Chaucer from Spenser?! And when and where did the new Hebrew literature begin-in the last two decades of the eighteenth century, in Germany, as part of the so-called Enlightenment revolution, as the majority of scholars maintain, or half a century earlier, when Hebrew writing in Italy and Holland assumed some of the stylistic and generic characteristics of European neoclassicism, as other scholars and Chaim Nachman Bialik, the greatest modern Hebrew poet, believed; or in the sixteenth century, when Hebrew poetry written in Italy gradually distanced itself from its medieval origins and absorbed the spirit of the Italian Renaissance, as one single scholar (Eisig Silberschlag) insisted? And what about the old literature with which the new one presumably broke; was there ever such a thing? Was there a unified and continuous pre-modern or medieval Hebrew literature, or what the historical record really shows is that there were quite a few old Hebrew literatures (in themselves forming a part of the larger complex of Jewish literatures), each with its separate traditions, themes, ideational presuppositions, and poetics; and that some of them, for instance, the medieval Spanish (actually, Andalusian) Hebrew poetry, in both its main genres, the sacred and the secular, has in reality been continued-in North Africa, Iraq, and other centers in the Middle East-alongside, and totally independently, of the contemporary new literature, well into the twentieth century? For how can we subsume under the single roof of an old Hebrew literature completely divergent entities such as: the vast domains of the rabbinical legal discourse; a tradition of philosophical-rationalist writing informed by the medieval legacy of Aristotelianism; an aggregate of commentary on the sacrosanct texts, which was split in two and ran in opposite directions; a quasi-philological one, which strove to discover the "simple" meaning of the holy text within its specific context, and a homiletic-midrashic one, which deconstructing the text, tearing parts of it from their respective contexts and conflating them with other parts with which they ostensibly had no real connection, elicited from them the exegete's own ethical and theological cogitation; a liturgical tradition of a poetry written with the purpose of supplementing the synagogue ritual-periphrastic, allusive, astoundingly innovative in its style, and yet surprisingly continuous in its forms and prosody, and in its abiding by a separate taxonomy of generic traditions, all its own, which it did not share with the other poetry written in Hebrew at the same time: a poetry based on Arabic models, with meters, forms, and genres borrowed from these models; a poetry that could be hedonistic, sensual, celebrating the pleasures of wine and sex (both heterosexual and homosexual), of manicured gardens, music, fragrances, and the sweet flow of the seasons within the sheltered courtly world of the rich and pampered, and at the same time-metaphysical, spiritual, philosophical, somberly pondering the realities of death and decomposition, the awesome dimensions of the universe, the ultimate reality of an unseen God, the inability to grasp the various aspects of His being, and the yearning for His proximity, for an intimate contact with Him; a moralistic narrative literature of didactic and edifying parables, legends, and hagiography (stories about the lives, deeds, and sayings of holy and wise people); counterbalanced by collections of witty and comic tales, written in flowery rhyming prose, misogynist in its tendency, sexist, replete with salacious double entendres, and offering a view of human behavior as lowly and debased, conditioned by greed, lust, egotism, and inherent obtuseness; a mystical tradition replete with Neoplatonic myths and metaphors, dramatizing the history of the universe as having undergone a primal metaphysical big bang, a catastrophe that destroyed the conduits through which the divine overflow could reach the lowly world of matter through the ten spheres of God's immanence. Did all these belong within one old literature? If it was religious faith that cemented all the different old...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2010
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0804762007
• ISBN 13: 9780804762007
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 543
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland