that these texts are essentially literary, that is, fictional, accounts about men and (occasionally) women who probably lived but functioned primarily as signifiers of values within the culture, as exempla (Fränkel 1981). But once we read the individual narratives as "fictions," it becomes increasingly difficult not only to imagine any outside to the text but even to connect the different moments of the Talmud itself one to another, that is, to read the biographical legends and the legal-ritual discourse together. Since we no longer imagine that the stories reflect the "real" events of ''real" lives of the "authors'' of the legal discourse, the latter seems to come from no-one and nowhere.
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Once the biographical narratives are bereft of referentiality, the legal texts have no authors and are disconnected from the stories.
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The notion, however, that rabbinic literature of any genre is autonomous (in the New Critical sense) seems counter-intuitive in the extreme. If ever there was a literature whose very form declares its embeddedment in social practice and historical reality, it is these texts. How may we, then, historicize our readings of these stories, given the historical skepticism I have outlined above? I propose that the older insight that there is connection between the genres of rabbinic textuality and also between them and a society can be preserved when we understand literature as discourseas discourse in the Foucauldian sense, best defined by Hodge:
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 | | When literature is seen as a contingent phenomenon produced in and by discourse, then a whole set of new objects and connections becomes immediately and directly available for study: social processes that flow through and irresistibly connect "literary" texts with many other kinds of texts, and social meanings that are produced in different ways from many social sites. This concept, following Foucault's influential usage, emphasizes literature as a process rather than simply a set of products; a process which is intrinsically social, connected at every point with mechanisms and institutions that mediate and control the flow of knowledge and power in a community.
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| | (Hodge 1990, viii)
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| | 19. Jacob Neusner's solution of regarding all texts as the products of their final redactors (1990) does not solve this problem either, simply because we know as little about the redactors as we do about the Rabbis quoted.
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| | 20. Thus even Weller (1989), who attempts to read the whole series of stories in Ketubbot as an ideological production (and does so with a fair degree of success), effectively ignores the halakhic context, seeing the stories as placed here only by "association" and not as an effort to work out the same cultural dynamic and problem encoded in the halakhic text.
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