Kabbalah and Literature

"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.'" 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