Review of Stein, Textual Mirrors

MARGINALIA: “Beneficent Incision”: Midrash and the Contemporary Critical Moment – By Adam Zachary Newton. Adam Zachary Newton on Dina Stein’s Textual Mirrors: Reflexivity, Midrash, and the Rabbinic Self. I hope the book is not as jargon laden as the review. Excerpt:

And what of an analysis that seeks dialogical partners drawn from a wholly different language game than the one practiced by the exegetes and compositors of the midrashic canon? Such partners would be not only rhetorically Other but also — and this is essential — institutionally so. Either the interpretive hazard increases or its practitioners become the agents, and we the beneficiaries, of a beneficent incision that may result in a text refreshed and rejuvenated. One of the great pleasures, then, of Dina Stein’s Textual Mirrors: Reflexivity, Midrash, and the Rabbinic Self is the imaginative and refracted light it casts upon the waking alertness, power, and fecundity of the midrashic enterprise tout court.

The book was noted earlier here.