Kabbalah, poetry and criticism: The Jewish mystical tradition in the poetry of William Butler Yeats and Edmond Jabes.
Item
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Title
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Kabbalah, poetry and criticism: The Jewish mystical tradition in the poetry of William Butler Yeats and Edmond Jabes.
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Identifier
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AAI9630514
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identifier
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9630514
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Creator
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Tawil, Miriam Judith.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Hanna Charney
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Date
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1996
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, Comparative | Literature, English | Literature, Romance
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Abstract
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It has been said that language can be conceived in two ways, either as a "magical" creative force as the Kabbalists believed, or as reflecting a linguistic nihilism as in certain forms of deconstruction. It is the aim of this dissertation to trace the similarities and differences in these two views, particularly as they work themselves out in the writing of William Butler Yeats and Edmond Jabes.;Yeats's poetry is the subject of the first half of this study. His work is examined because he used the Kabbalah in the context of his writing and invoked the mystical tradition to justify his use of symbols. The tension in his writing between the spiritual and physical leads to a dialogue on the Romantic symbol between the writings of Paul de Man and Harold Bloom.;Bloom uses Kabbalah as a interpretive model, a discipline employing a conceptional rhetoric oriented as psychic defenses. He sees it as a model for poetic influence and an example of "sublime" creation. De Man, on the other hand, valorizing irony, places the expression of the sublime beyond the reach of language, in the destabilized province of grammar and rhetoric.;In the fourth chapter, three aspects of this mode, the philosophic sublime of Kant, the poetic sublime of Yeats and the theological sublime of Kabbalah are examined to see if there is a similarity of structure or rhetoric. This raises question of the boundaries of discourse and the nature of revelation.;If Yeats is a writer of the sublime, Edmond Jabes is the writer of the anti-sublime. He combines a modern French poetic sensitivity with Kabbalistic insights. He concentrates on the withdrawal and negativity of God, the rupture within the word and the concept of the Book. Where Yeats wrote with a sense of the plenitude of language, Jabes wrote with a consciousness of its rupture, its dearth, yet both looked to Kabbalah for insights about language.;The final section of this study deals with Kabbalah and criticism. After an examination of contemporary Kabbalistic scholarship, we can see Kabbalah emerging an alternative, "heretical" hermeneutic.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
