 | 13. George Steiner, "Our Homeland, the Text,"
Salmagundi
No. 66 (WinterSpring 1985): 910.
|
| 14. Cynthia Ozick,
Art and Ardor
(New York: Knopf, 1983), 169.
|
| 15. Cf. Henry Louis Gates, Jr.,
The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 237: "In literature, blackness is produced in the text only through a complex process of signification. There can be no transcendental blackness, for it cannot and does not exist beyond manifestations of it in specific figures." Gates's critique of cultural essences, as in the notion of "transcendental blackness," and his emphasis instead on the linguistically produced or constructed ("signifying") quality of an identifiably "ethnic'' writing, makes his work very useful in any debate over what makes a book "black," "Jewish," etc.
|
| 16. Bloom, "Introduction," 6.
|
| 17. Jabès, "The Key," 352.
|
| 18. Ibid., 35354.
|
| 19. Jacques Derrida,
Writing and Difference,
trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 297.
|
| 20. See, for example, Robert Alter, "Old Rabbis, New Critics,"
The New Republic,
January 5 & 12, 1987, 2733; David Stern, "Midrash and Indeterminacy,"
Critical Inquiry
15 (Autumn 1988): 132161.
|
| 21. Stern, "Midrash and Indeterminacy," 161.
|
| 22. Regarding the relationship of ideology to the utopian and the messianic, see Norman Finkelstein, "The Utopian Function and the Refunctioning of Marxism,"
Diacritics
19 No. 2 (1989): 5465; and
The Utopian Moment in Contemporary American Poetry
(Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1988), 1328.
|
| 23. Scholem,
The Messianic Idea,
35.
|
| 24. Derrida,
Writing and Difference,
292.
|
|