World Languages & Literatures
Parabolic Style Across Jewish Literature
My current project, titled “Parabolic Style Across Jewish Literature,” has two parts: a literary-historical study which traces the influence of the religious parable (Hebrew: mashal) upon individual authors and movements; and a series of public-facing events which will draw popular attention to a dialogue already underway between contemporary, postmodern, writers and an ancient genre.
Parables of all time periods and religious traditions share distinct structural characteristics. The genealogy of the parable reaches from the Hebrew Bible, the ancient juridical parable, Jesus’ short stories, to Rabbinic Midrash, Hasidic tales, modernist short fiction and aphorisms, postwar and post-Holocaust writing, to contemporary literature in an age of pandemic.
Franz Kafka is a pivotal figure; he provides a template for what I have called parabolic style, namely, the diverse ways in which modern authors adapt the parable, and deploy its key stylistic features, to communicate wisdom in an age of non-belief. My book will provide a new genealogy of the relations between different expressions of the parable across literary exemplars (from the Bible to contemporary Israeli literature), across languages (Biblical Hebrew, German Hebrew, Yiddish) and across modes of interpretation (from religious exegesis to modern, secular, post-Holocaust, post-Zionist, post-pandemic meaning-making).
The significance of my project goes beyond Jewish literature. Parabolic style refers to a particular mode of reading and writing which connects with contemporary questions. The critical point is that such texts don’t tell us what to do; they invite us to think for ourselves. The works I study challenge the rigid divide between religious and secular writing. Writers both religious and secular write parables precisely because they are not fixed, ideological documents, but enigmatic, imaginative, layered, sources of wisdom. In our time, it behooves us to explore the significance of the literary dialogue already underway between secular, even postmodern writers, and biblical and religious literature, and bring these works to public attention.
My sabbatical timetable remains a work-in-progress. I hope to spend 1-2 months in Israel in Fall 2021. I am also planning to conduct research in Frankfurt and Vienna. I look forward to being part of the BUCH fellows community in Spring 2022!