Kabbalah and Literature

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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 Kabbalahs conceptual underpinnings, aesthetic principles, tenets, and signifiers to demonstrate how literatures 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 kabbalists 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 texts epistemological elements to embrace its "secrets."

Reviews

In a work rich in critical insight and alive to the power and magic of religious narrative and theology, Kitty Millets 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 *
Millets Kabbalah and Literature is a bold and fascinating work. It embraces the idea of a secular kabbalah with both hands, carries the reader through four centuries of antinomian Jewish literature, and demonstrates how Lurianic and gnostic Judaism, unshackled from tradition but not from Jewishness, achieves a freedom to create, to innovate, and to sustain life within this world and on the written page. The book is lucid about devilishly complex matters. It is also exhilarating, powerful, and full of startling formulations that will haunt readers long after they have put it back on the shelf. * James Porter, Irving Stone Professor in Literature, University of California, Berkeley, USA *
Neither a game nor a superstition, this book reveals kabbalah as a practice that dissolves and recomposes language, mimesis, and society in a supreme questioning of authority. With an astonishing flair for intellectual contact-tracing in a constantly shifting historical landscape, Kitty Millet opens to new scrutiny authors both canonical and little-known, as well as many ways of being Jewish. * Haun Saussy, Professor, Committee on Social Thought, University of Chicago, USA *

Author Bio

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).