Summoning: Ideas of the Covenant and Interpretive Theory

292 Pages·1993·19.433 MB·English

by  Ellen Spolsky

Ideas of the COVe1ltl.JH

SUMMONING
SUNY Series in Modern Jewish Literature and Culture
Sarah Blacher Cohen, Editor
SUMMONING
Ideas of the Covenant and
Interpretive Theory
edited by
ELLEN SPOLSKY
State University
of New York
Press
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint
essays that have appeared elsewhere:
Paul Contino, Editor of Religion and Literature, for Susan Handelman's
essay, "Facing the Other: Levinas, Perelman, and Rosenzweig," Religion and
Literature 22, 2-3 (Summer-Autumn 1990)
Daniel Walden, Editor of Studies in American Jewish Literature for Sharon
Deykin Baris' essay "Intertextuality and Reader Responsibility: Living On in
Malamud's The Mourners," which appeared in Vol. 2, 1 (1992) of that journal
H. M. Daleski, Editor of Hebrew University Studies in Literature and the
Arts, for Elizabeth Freund's essay "Binding and Unbinding: The Summons to
Interpretation in The Merchant of Venice," which appeared in HSLA 19
(1991)
Published by
State University of New York Press, Albany
© 1993 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Production by Susan Geraghty
Marketing by Bernadette La Manna
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced
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except in the case of brief quotations embodied in
critical articles and reviews.
For information, address State University of New York
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Summoning: ideas of the covenant and interpretive theory / edited by
Ellen Spolsky.
p. cm. - (SUNY series in modern Jewish literature and
culture)
Includes index.
ISBN 0-7914-1525-2. - ISBN 0-7914-1526-0 (pbk.)
1. Religion and literature. 2. Literature-History and criticism
Theory, etc. 3. Covenant theology in literature. 4. Covenants
Religious aspects-Judaism. 5. Judaism-Essence, genius, nature.
I. Spolsky, Ellen, 1943- . II. Series.
PN49.S84 1993
809' .93382-dc20 92-23258
CIP
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
In the fall of 1989, honoring a debt to the seminal
scholarship of Professor Harold Fisch on the description
of Covenantal Hermeneutics, the Lechter Institute for
Literary Research in cooperation with the Kaplan Fund
for American Literature, held a conference at Bar-Ilan
University, Israel, for the purpose of exploring the
implications of that work for current interpretive theory.
Since its founding in 1981 the Lechter Institute has held
several conferences on aspects of the relationship between
contemporary literary study and scholarship in Jewish
Studies. Two collections of essays have been published:
David H. Hirsch and Nehama Aschkenasy edited Biblical
Patterns in Modern Literature, Brown Judaic Studies 77,
1984, which gathers the essays from a 1982 conference.
The Uses of Adversity: Failure and Accommodation in
Reader Response, edited by Ellen Spolsky, Bucknell UP:
1991, collected the papers from a 1985 conference. This
conference focused on the similarities and differences
between the notion of a contract or a shared grammar,
the prototypical example of which is human language,
and the clearly related though distinguishably different
concept of the covenant, the prototype of which is the
covenant made between God and the Israelites at Mount
Sinai. This volume is dedicated, with appreciation and
love, to Harold Fisch.

CONTENTS
Ellen Spolsky Introduction
tX
1. Harold Fisch Power and Constraint:
Covenantal Hermeneutics in Milton 1
THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES 25
2. Gerda Elata-Alster
and Rachel Salmon Biblical Covenants as
Performative Language 27
3. Susan Handelman Facing the Other: Levinas,
Perelman, and Rosenzweig 47
4. Daniel Statman The Difficulty of Finding a Moral
Basis for Accepting the Covenant 71
5. Menachem Fisch The Perpetual Covenant of Jewish
Learning 91
6. Betty Rojtman The Sign of the Covenant 115
VB
Vlll CONTENTS
COVENANTS AND TEXTS 129
7. Betsy Halpern-Amaru Redesigning Redemption:
Covenant in The Testament
of Moses 131
8. Daniel Boyarin Placing Reading: Ancient Israel
and Medieval Europe 155
9. Elizabeth Freund Binding and Unbinding: The
Summons to Interpretation
in The Merchant of Venice 187
10. Emily Miller Budick American Literature's
Declaration of In/dependence:
Stanley Cavell, Nathaniel
Hawthorne, and the
Covenant of Consent 211
11. Sharon Deykin Baris Intertextuality and Reader
Responsibility: Living On
in Malamud's
"The Mourners" 229
12. Sam B. Girgus "The New Covenant" and
the Dilemma of Dissensus:
Bercovitch, Roth, and Doctorow 251
Contributors 271