Judisk Kultur

Jubilee Guest Robert Alter, USA
Necessary Angels
– Tradition and Modernity in Kafka, Benjamin and Scholem
Med efterföljande mingel
Tisdag 21 mars kl. 19:00
Konstakademien
Fredsgatan 12/Jakobsgatan 27c

Biljetter

On the occasion of its 10th jubilee, Judisk kultur i Sverige is proud to present Robert Alter, foremost and highly decorated contemporary scholar of Hebrew and comparative literature.

Alter has written widely on the European novel from the eighteenth century to the present, on American fiction, and on modern Hebrew literature. He has also written extensively on literary aspects of the Bible. His twenty-eight published books include two prize-winning volumes on biblical narrative and poetry and award-winning translations of Genesis and of the Five Books of Moses. His completed translation of the Hebrew Bible with a commentary was published in 2018 in a three-volume set.

Necessary Angels - Tradition and Modernity in Kafka, Benjamin and Scholem

In four elegant chapters, Robert Alter explains the radiance created by the association of three modern masters: Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin, and Gershom Scholem. The volume pinpoints the intersections of these divergent witnesses to the modern condition of doubt, the no-man’s-land between traditional religion and modern secular culture.

Scholem, the devoted Zionist and master historian of Jewish mysticism, and Benjamin, the Marxist cultural critic, dedicated much of their thought and correspondence to Kafka, the explorer in fiction of radical alienation. Kafka’s sense of spiritual complexities was an inspiration to both thinkers in their resistance to the murderous simplification of totalitarian ideology. In Necessary Angels, Alter uncovers a moment when the future of modernism is revealed in its preoccupation with the past.

Alter’s focus on the force of memory on these three great modernists shows with sometimes startling, sometimes prophetic clarity that a complete break with tradition is not essential to modernism. Necessary Angels itself continues the necessary discovery of the future in the past.

Necessary Angels: Tradition and Modernity in Kafka, Benjamin and Scholem will be published in Swedish in spring 2023 by bokförlaget Faethon.