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Reading Closely, Reading Distantly, Reading Slowly. Three Approaches to “Giving” the Law in PT Megilla

Mon, December 17, 5:00 to 6:30pm, Seaport Hotel & World Trade Center, Federal 2 Complex

Abstract

Critical theories of reading informed ways the scholars read rabbinic literatures. David Halivni’s reading of the “intent” of the Bavli’s “redactors” or Azzan Yadin’s reading of intentional fallacy in the Midrash articulate themselves along the lines of respectively romantic notion of authorial intent and of its suspension in the theory of the “close reading.” Readers of Midrash from Boyarin’s “intertextuality” to scholars equating Midrash with poststructuralism illustrate the same connection between reading and theory. Along the similar lines, Foucault’s notion of “discourse” transforming “author” into a figure of the “work” articulates Shamma Friedman’s theory of textual transformation as the foundation of reading the Bavli “scientifically.”
This paper takes an opposite direction and asks how rabbis reading the Bible and each other complicate critical theory of reading. To that end, I develop a connection between theories and practices of critical reading of rabbinic texts explicitly and as a task rather than silently or by way of application as in the approaches above. I specifically engage and negotiate the theories of the close reading of Wimsatt and Beardsley and Azzan Yadin and of the distant reading of Franco Moretti and Yona Freankel in order to arrive to, apply, and critically assess a theory and a practice of reading slowly. Methodologically switching from space as a grounding metaphor of reading (“distant” and “close” are ultimately characteristics of space) to time, speed, and rupture I articulate and probe an approach to reading the opening pericope in Yerushalmi Megilla slowly rather than either closely or distantly. Thematically, at the forefront of this reading will be the practice of citing, quoting and referencing that the pericope displays. Conceptually, at the center is a rabbinic metaphor of “giving” the law by interpreting a citation, and the inevitable rupture with the past which such a citation puts on display. My argument proceeds both along and against the grain of how the Yerushalmi’s notion of “giving” a law has been read by both scholars and commentators, influenced, as they were, by the norms and habits of reading and interpreting the Babylonian Talmud.

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