The Poetics of Prophecy, then, presents the tension between the construction of a strong authoritative prophetic voice (the ever-present radio!) and the weakness, uncertainty, doubt, and fissure built into prophecy from the Bible onward, through three staged encounters between scholars and poets, all of whom are deeply invested in the idea of prophecy, and come to shape its very form in modernity. I hope that these particular encounters serve as metonymies for larger intellectual and literary responses to the Bible from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. I can also see, in retrospect, that they comprise investigations into my own intellectual genealogies.This is the fourth AJR essay on Yosefa Raz's The Poetics of Prophecy. The earlier essays are noted here and links. Cf. also here.
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