Profane Scriptures Reflections on the Dialogue With the Bible in Modern Hebrew Poetry

For a people returning to their homeland, the Bible served as a legal document of ownership and as an historical and political model for the newly revived Jewish kingdom. At the same time, however, it became the focal point for the people's personal hopes, expectations, disappointments, and frustrations with the Promised Land. It is the latter, Ruth Kartun-Blum argues, that fuels the fascination that biblical myth holds for the modern Israeli poet.Originally delivered in 1995 as three lectures in the Efroymson Series at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, Profane Scriptures explores aspects of the complex relationship between modern Hebrew poetry and the Bible. Kartun-Blum, in the first two lectures, traces the link between the psychological roots of the collective experience and stylistic phenomena. Focusing on those stylistic lectures natural to the Hebrew language that allow the special fusion between past and present to take place, she uses the story of the Binding of Isaac (the aqedah)and its metamorphosis as a test case for studying the history of modern Hebrew poetry and Hebrew poetics and shows how the tools and terminology of modern literary theory ("paronomasia, " "aggregate of register, " "the great intertext, " "negative presupposition, " etc.) can be used to investigate historical change.Devoted to a consideration of the work of Yona Wallach (1944-85), the third lecture consists of an analysis of Wallach's poem "The Troubles of Donna Theresa, " which, Kartun-Blum argues, demonstrates intertextual strategies can evoke an idea of female identity in contemporary Israeli women's writing. In a fascinating deconstruction of the Wallach poem, Kartun-Blum argues that the was influenced by canonic Catholic mystical sources and especially by Giovanni Lorenzo Bernini's celebrated sculpture of Saint Theresa. She also presents evidence for intertextual relationships between the poem and the Amor and Psyche myth and the Eshet Hayil ("VirtuouKartun-Blum, Ruth is the author of 'Profane Scriptures Reflections on the Dialogue With the Bible in Modern Hebrew Poetry' with ISBN 9780814328811 and ISBN 0814328814.