Catastrophe, Lament, and Protest in the Afterlife of a Biblical Book
In Surviving Lamentations, Tod Linafelt offers an alternative reading of Lamentations in light of the "literature of survival" (works written by survivors of catastrophe) as well as literary and philosophical reflections on "the survival of literature." He refocuses attention on the figure of Zion as a manifestation of a basic need to give voice to suffering, and traces the afterlife of Lamentations in Jewish literature, in which text after text attempts to provide the response to Zion's lament that is lacking in Lamentations itself.
Seen through Linafelt's eyes, Lamentations emerges as uncannily relevant to contemporary discourse on survival.
Introduction: How to Survive the Book of Lamentations
1. Matters of Life and Death: Literature of Survival and the Survival of Literature
2. "None Survived or Escaped": Reading for Survival in Lamentations 1 and 2
3. Living beyond Lamentations: The Rhetoric of Survival in Second Isaiah
4. Survival in Translation: The Targum to Lamentations
5. Life in Excess: The Midrash on Lamentations
6. Poetics of Survival: Eleazar Ben Kallir's Medieval Kinot
7. Survival under Threat: Contemporary Possibilities and Impossibilities
Appendix: Three Kinot of Eliezer Ben Kallir