Primacies: Experience, Expression, and the Jewish Imagination

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 catalyze our most powerful literary expressions of sorrow, joy,...