Canon and Creativity: Modern Writing and the Authority of Scripture

Alter's readings of Kafka's Amerika, Bialik's "The Dead of the Desert," and Joyce's Ulysses offer compelling evidence of the complex authority that Biblical (particularly Hebrew) texts exercise in modern literature. He brings a fresh perspective to "canon" as a concept that has come full circle from its appropriation in Christian thought as a label for a body of doctrinally normative sacred texts through its extension in the last half of the twentieth century to a body of ideologically normative secular texts to an approximation of its use by Hellenistic grammarians to designate a body of texts that measured up to a literary-aesthetic standard rather than a doctrinal or ideological one. Alter extends this usage to illuminate the otherwise inexplicable inclusion of books such as Esther, Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes, and Job in the canon of Hebrew Scripture. A canon is "a transhistorical textual community." As such, it is not an exclusionary tool wielded by those in power but a conversational space for the play of creativity and the cultivation of continuity. Readers interested in Kafka, Joyce, and the flowering of Hebrew literature in Russia around the turn of the twentieth century will find much of value here, as will readers concerned with the use and abuse of "canon" in contemporary literary and pedagogical discussion.