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Primacies
Experience, Expression, and the Jewish Imagination
Brief Description
A powerful exploration of how literature expresses and transforms our earliest preverbal experiences. Primacies begins with the assertion that our earliest preverbal experiences are accompanied by a primary language—a universal expression of tears, cries, and laughter offered long before we learn our distinctive, ordinary languages. For...
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Description
A powerful exploration of how literature expresses and transforms our earliest preverbal experiences.
Primacies begins with the assertion that our earliest preverbal experiences are accompanied by a primary language—a universal expression of tears, cries, and laughter offered long before we learn our distinctive, ordinary languages. For Michael Fishbane, these "primacies" release the raw feelings of our existential condition and catalyse our most powerful literary expressions of sorrow, joy, and fulfilment.
In this book, Fishbane explores how ancient, medieval, and modern literature and poetry express and transform these primal sensations. Building on his theological project begun in Sacred Attunement and Fragile Finitude, Fishbane offers here a radically new lived hermeneutics that seeks to do nothing less than redefine the relationship between experience and language.
Book Details
INFORMATION
ISBN: 9780226842110
Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
Format: Hardback
Date Published: 20 August 2025
Country: United States
Imprint: University of Chicago Press
Audience: Tertiary education, Professional and scholarly
DIMENSIONS
Spine width: 25.0mm
Width: 140.0mm
Height: 216.0mm
Weight: 454g
Pages: 272
Collections
About the Author
Michael Fishbane is the Nathan Cummings Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Jewish Studies at the University of Chicago. He is the author of many books, including Sacred Attunement: A Jewish Theology and Fragile Finitude: A Jewish Hermeneutical Theology, also published by the University of Chicago Press.
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