Inhalt: | Frontmatter -- Acknowledgements -- Contents -- Abbreviations -- Introduction: Enigmas, Beneath and Beyond -- Part I: Before the Book -- 1 Jews in Egypt. First Pre-texts -- 2 The Tale of Jacques. The Hidden Narrative of the Book -- 3 On Being Jewish. Writing and Rewriting -- 4 Rabbis, Poets, Commentators. The Addition of Text -- 5 From Bible to Book. Local and Metatextual Translations -- 6 Becoming Book. Archaeology of a Preface -- Part II: The Paths Toward Metaphor -- Chapter 1 Jewishness Deconstructed -- Chapter 2 Un-Writing the Holocaust -- Part III: The Book and Its Pre-Texts. Theoretical Questions -- Chapter 3 Manuscripts, Intertextuality, Hermeneutics -- Chapter 4 The Book, the Palimpsest, and the Graffiti. Archaeological Reflections on the Open Text -- Bibliography This book offers a fresh reflection on The Book of Questions by the French-Egyptian Jewish writer Edmond Jabès and its readings, and proposes to re-contextualize Jabès' enigmatic prose through the lens of the author’s manuscripts. Addressed are the main prisms through which Jabès’ oeuvre has been read since its publication in 1963: Jewishness, the Shoah, intertextuality with Midrash and Kabbalah, hermeticism and interpretation. It analyzes their shapes and their becoming in the work-in-progress, reveals the dynamics and the contexts of their evolution from the pre-texts to the text and beyond, and reflects on the relationship between creation, interpretation, and writing as a process. It seeks to rethink our reading of The Book of Questions and the poetics and hermeneutics of enigmatic writing |
