1. The notion of "prosaics" in this sense was first made explicit by Gary Saul Morson in Hidden in Plain View: Narrative and Creative Potentials in 'War and Peace" (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987) and in his "Prosaics:

      An Approach to the Humanities," American Scholar, Autumn 1988, pp. 515-28. It was further developed by Caryl Emerson and Gary Saul Morson in Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990). I have both drawn upon and questioned Emerson's and Morson's Bakhtin-inspired understanding of prosaics, and suggested other directions and issues that prosaic studies ought to explore in Bitter Carnival: Ressentiment and the Abject Hero (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).

2. Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1965), 17-19.

3. "Es gibt kein ethisches Handeln, sondern nur einen ethischen Zustand," in Prosa und Stücke, Kleine Prosa, Aphorismen, Autobiographisches, Essays und Reden, Kritik, ed. Adolf Frisé (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1978), 1017. For a suggestive, but unfortunately rather sketchy discussion of some of the links between Wittgenstein's and Musil's thinking, see Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin, Wittgenstein's Vienna (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973).

4. I am indebted here to a stimulating letter from Kenneth A. Bruffee in which he raises a series of important questions about my earlier account of prosaic ethics in Bitter Carnival: Ressentiment and the Abject Hero (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). See also Bruffee's analysis in Elegiac Romance: Cultural Change and Loss of the Hero in Modern Fiction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983). My discussion in this chapter deliberately returns to some of the formulations I first ventured in Bitter Carnival, but augments and, I hope, clarifies them further in light of the new context opened up by the theory of sideshadowing and the concrete example of Jewish history.

5. Amos Funkenstein, "Theological Responses to the Holocaust," in his Perceptions of Jewish History (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), 306-37.

6. I have taken these sentences from pages 332-33 of Funkenstein, "Theological Responses to the Holocaust."

7. Walter Benjamin, "The Storyteller," in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), 87. In tracing one writer's attempt to forge a new, radically idiosyncratic novelistic voice in modern Hebrew, Robert Alter makes a useful distinction between the European novel's traditional focus on the specific individual and that of "the Hebrew literary tradition . . . from the rabbinic period onward through its multiple historical offshoots . . . [which was] inclined to see the individual

      as a prototype or spokesman for the collective." Alter, "Fogel and the Forging of a Hebrew Self," Prooftexts 13 (1993): 9.

8. I owe this phrase to Douglas Abrams Arava of the University of California Press.

9. Yehuda Amichai, "Tourists," in Chana Bloch and Stephen Mitchell, eds. and trans., Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai (New York: Harper and Row, 1986), 137-38.