Description
Book SynopsisIn The Third Pillar, Geoffrey Hartman, one of the most influential scholars and teachers of English and Comparative Literature of recent decades, has brought together some of the most important and eloquent essays he has written since the 1980s on the major texts of the Jewish tradition.
Trade Review"In the form, substance, intellectual brio, and imaginative reach of these essays, Geoffrey Hartman has no peer. And to say it (almost) otherwise: in learning and in originality, two characteristics that are only very rarely found paired, Geoffrey Hartman is matchless. You may read him solely as a scholar if you wish, but once you stir in the 'creative,' you will have something or someone else: a poet. In these essays, Hartman as innate poet speaks to
readers: to readers of poetry, to discerners of bottomless ideas, to you and to me." * Cynthia Ozick *
Table of ContentsPreface
PART I. BIBLE
Chapter 1. The Struggle for the Text
Chapter 2. The Blind Side of the Akedah
Chapter 3. Numbers: Realism and Magic
Chapter 4. Meaning and Music
Chapter 5. The Poetics of Prophecy
PART II. MIDRASH
Chapter 6. Midrash as Law and Literature
Chapter 7. Jewish Tradition as/and the Other
Chapter 8. Angels in the Academy: The Drama of Commentary
Chapter 9. Text, Spirit, and the Bat Kol
PART III. EDUCATION
Chapter 10. Who Is an Educated Jew?
Chapter 11. Religious Literacy
Chapter 12. On the Jewish Imagination
Chapter 13. The Artist between Sacred and Profane
Notes
Index
Acknowledgments
