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But Whither the Peacock? The Wallich Manuscript and Itzik Manger’s Anthologism

Sun, December 15, 4:15 to 5:45pm, Hilton Bayfront San Diego, Aqua Salon C

Abstract

In 1938, Itzik Manger published NOENTE GESHTALTN, a series of prose vignettes illustrating key figures and scenes from the history of Yiddish letters. The first of these relates the physical production of a seventeenth-century manuscript (Bodleian Opp. add. 4° 136) by Isaac b. Moses Wallich, a Jewish householder of Worms and obsessive collector of Yiddish popular songs. Invoking theories of poetic transmission au courant in contemporary literary historiography (among them the now-debunked SHPILMAN-theory), Manger portrayed Wallich as a scrupulous textual steward, handing down an inviolate record of vernacular poetry to future generations. The following year, Manger penned his most essay, FOLKLOR UN LITERATUR, arguing that modern poetry in all its experimentalism evolved genetically, as it were, out of pre-modern popular song.
Manger’s insistence on a genetic model of literary history goes some way to explaining his fascination with the material production and transmission of early modern Yiddish poetry by textual stewards like Wallich. Literature may mutate and evolve in the course of textual transmission, but for Manger the MATERIAL continuity of its reproduction was to be a guarantee of CULTURAL continuity across epochs. In the present paper, by contrast, I read Manger against the grain to show how, far from a literal record of the folk-historical past, anthologies like Wallich’s crystallized preoccupations with textual fixity and evidentiary scholarship newly emergent in early modernity. The genre of the early modern commonplace book in particular—with which Wallich’s manuscript shares many material features—epitomizes how manuscript production in the age of print represented a fundamental departure from earlier modes of literary transmission. Manger may have traced his poetic genealogy to the misty, medieval past of the SHPILMAN but his textual practice was born of the obsessive anthologism of the seventeenth century.

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