Kabbalah and Literature

Professor Kitty Millet (San Francisco State University, USA)

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English

Bloomsbury Academic USA
07 March 2024

Literature: history & criticism; Literary theory; Literary studies: general; Comparative religion; Jewish studies

Series: Comparative Jewish Literatures

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.""

By: Professor Kitty Millet (San Francisco State University USA)
Imprint: Bloomsbury Academic USA
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm,
ISBN: 9781501359682
ISBN 10: 1501359681
Series: Comparative Jewish Literatures
Pages: 272
Publication Date: 07 March 2024
Audience: College/higher education , Primary
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

"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"

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 is also chairperson of the International Comparative Literature Association (ICLA) research committee on Religion, Ethics, and Literature. She is author of The Victims of Slavery, Colonization, and the Holocaust: A Comparative History of Persecution (Bloomsbury, 2017) and co-editor of Fault Lines of Modernity: The Fractures and Repairs of Religion, Ethics, and Literature (Bloomsbury, 2018).

Reviews for Kabbalah and Literature

In a work rich in critical insight and alive to the power and magic of religious narrative and theology, Kitty Millet’s marvelous new book argues for the fundamental role that Jewish mysticism and the Kabbalah have played in the formation of modern literature. In these pages, Millet proves herself to be a keen student of the mystics, enchanting us with discussions of language and its secrets while revealing new layers of meaning in some of the foundational texts of modern Western and Jewish literature. * Samuel Kessler, Assistant Professor of Religion, Gustavus Adolphus College, USA *