In Adam Levin's The Instructions (2010), an intoxicating protagonist named Gurion ben-Judah Maccabee is a ten-year-old Jewish boy from Chicago who thinks that he might become the Messiah. The novel therefore dramatizes itself as Gurion's recorded scripture, and it opens with a “Blessings” section that includes a call to “forgive” Adonai for His “mistakes”: “Because you know that Your mistakes, though a part of You, are nonetheless mistakes, we accept that Your mistakes, though Yours, are ours to repair.” E. L. Doctorow's City of God (2000) makes a similar move when a priest converted from Episcopalianism to Reform Judaism prays aloud, “I think we must remake You. If we are to remake ourselves, we must remake You, Lord. We need a place to stand.” While the language of repair has deep Kabbalistic roots in the Hebrew concept of tikkun olam, we see in contemporary American literature a radicalization of...
Mystical Emulations, Inverted Echoes: “Adonai Is Mistaken” and the “God Minus” Reinterpretation of Nietzsche Available to Purchase
Nathan D. Frank is a PhD candidate in English Literature at the University of Virginia, and he holds a Master of International Studies (MIntSt) from the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand, and an MA in English Literature from the University of Colorado at Boulder. His peer-reviewed work appears in Biblical Interpretation, Disability Studies Quarterly, Humanities, and Frontiers of Narrative Studies. He has contributed chapters to a handful of edited collections, including Diffractive Reading: New Materialism, Theory and Critique (ed. Kai Merten), Spatial Literary Studies: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Space, Geography, and the Imagination (ed. Robert Tally, Jr.), E. L Doctorow: A Reconsideration (eds. Michael Wutz and Julian Murphet), and Explorations of Consciousness in Contemporary Fiction (eds. Grzegorz Maziarczyk and Joanna Teske). He has served as the scholarly editor of Kudzu Quarterly and more recently he co-organized the 2020 U2 Conference, where he also participated as a panelist. Forthcoming is an essay in Unorthodox Minds (eds. Maziarczyk and Teske) that reads Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses according to his own theory of virtuality. His essay, “Of Non-Mice and Non-Men: Against Essentialism in Joshua Ferris's The Unnamed,” was nominated for the David D. Anderson Award for Outstanding Essay in Midwestern Literary Studies by the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature (SSML). His paper “Diamond Wheels and Machetes: The Political Praxis of Prosthesis” won the Charles Davis Award for the Outstanding Graduate Student Presentation at the Rocky Mountain MLA (RMMLA) Convention in 2012, and it also appears as an essay in Rocky Mountain Review. His dissertation explores how the work of novelists such as E. L. Doctorow, Toni Morrison, Joshua Ferris, Salman Rushdie, and Adam Levin invokes, reimagines, and emulates scriptural and apocryphal modes of textuality.
Nathan D. Frank; Mystical Emulations, Inverted Echoes: “Adonai Is Mistaken” and the “God Minus” Reinterpretation of Nietzsche. CR: The New Centennial Review 1 July 2022; 22 (2): 271–300. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/crnewcentrevi.22.2.0271
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