The Poetics of Prophecy: Modern Afterlives of a Biblical Tradition

Join us for a book presentation of The Poetics of Prophecy (Cambridge University Press), as Dr Yosefa Raz discusses the intersection of Romantic poetry and biblical scholarship in the reinvention of prophecy, in conversation with Dr Yael Almog, MLAC.

Since the mid-1700s, poets and scholars have been deeply entangled in the project of reinventing prophecy. Moving between literary and biblical studies, The Poetics of Prophecy reveals how Romantic poetry is linked to modern biblical scholarship’s development. On the one hand, scholars, intellectuals, and artists discovered models of strong prophecy in biblical texts, shoring up aesthetic and nationalist ideals, while on the other, poets drew upon a countertradition of destabilizing, indeterminate, weak prophetic power. Yosefa Raz considers British and German Romanticism alongside their margins, incorporating Hebrew literature written at the turn of the twentieth century in the Russian Empire. Ultimately, she explains the weakness of modern poet-prophets not only as a crisis of secularism but also, strikingly, as part of the instability of the biblical text itself.

Dr Yosefa Raz is a senior lecturer in the department of English Literature at the University of Haifa, where she specializes in the study of the Bible and its reception, poetry and poetics, and Romantic and contemporary poetry. She is also a poet and translator, with work recently published in The Brooklyn Rail, Boston Review, and The Los Angeles Review of Books.

Dr Yael Almog is an Associate Professor of German at Durham University. Her research encompasses the cultural history of Germany from 1750 to the present, with a focus on theology, particularly the interactions between Jewish and Christian communities and the evolution of German-Jewish thought.

The event will be followed by a drinks reception — all welcome.

No need to register.