Summoning

Ellen Spolsky is Associate Professor at Bar-Ilan University, Israel and Director of the Lechter Institute for Literary Research.

"This book is a solid contribution to the ongoing study of the relationship between traditional Jewish textuality and modern literary analysis. The quality of the scholarship is of a uniformly high level. Appropriately enough, the Harold Fisch essay that opens the collection is a hermeneutical masterpiece.I find the application of covenantal hermeneutics to a wide range of literary works—from Shakespeare to Philip Roth—to be surprisingly convincing. I also appreciate the interdisciplinary approach, given that some of the essays deal with philosophy, the sciences, and law, as well as biblical, rabbinic, and modern, literary hermeneutics." — Norman Finkelstein, Xavier University

• Acknowledgments Introduction The difficulties and advantages of assuming modularity of mindDescribing changes in literary systemsHow can these claims be investigated? 1. Minds, Modules, and Models The earliest and strongest version of the modularity hypothesisJackendoff's modularity theoryThe visual and the language modulesGardner's modularity theoryThe crucial recognition of failureParrallel distributed processing modelsEdelman's Neural DarwinismDennett's gappy consciousnessSumming up and hedging 2. New Genres: American Autobiography Western American autobiographyThe category fits the time 3. New Inferences: Reading Hamlet and the Politics of Genre Resisting genreCategorization and inference 4. Women Readers and Women's Rules Fetterley's reading and Fetterley's ruleGilbert's reading without Fetterley's ruleCategorization and transformation: Leaving room for the improbable 5. Intermodular Competition: Transformation and Inference Metaphor and visionPreference rulesAdvantages and risks of multiple coding 6. Immobile and Immortal in the Monument of Literary History Resistance to change: The conservatism if the experienced readerThe link between the Middle Ages and the RenaissanceSpearing's dignity conditions and alterity conditionsThe Bloom connection 7. Writing Literary History: Neoclassicism, Modularity, and the New Histories Viewer-centered and object-centered understandingSpeaker-centered vs. public languageInteraction of the object-centered and the viewer-centeredLeaving space for the otherNew historical criticismListening to others 8. The Dynamic of Freedom and Compulsion The inevitability of contradictionA Summary of the possibilities for change in the modular mindBuilding culture into the survival of the speciesResisting reading NotesReferences Index