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there is a relic here of a position that did not recognize wife-rape as forbidden. I cannot claim that the more generous interpretation is a "better" or more truthful one than the first. 10 There very probably was dissent within the rabbinic culture, here as in so many other situations. In any case the Talmud cites the emphatic halakha against wife-rape to its implied male audience, so that those readers, at any rate, cannot misunderstand and derive from here permission to treat their wives as objects. What can be said to be established, therefore, is that whatever the view of Rabbi or Rabbi
10. For an excellent account of decision criteria for interpretations in a feminist-critical context, see Bal (1987, 1115). My second, more generous, interpretation observes the convention of unity, a convention that I am otherwise opposed to throughout, so this cannot serve as a criterion in its favor. On the other hand, it may also serve to render the text more useful in the sense that Bal articulates: "One modest and legitimate goal has always been a fuller understanding of the text, one that is sophisticated, reproducible, and accessible to a larger audience. As long as by 'a fuller understanding' one means having found a more satisfying way of integrating the reading experience into one's life, more possibilities of doing something with this experience, such an approach is a justifiable critical practice. . . . These criteria are basically pragmatic. Far from having anything to do with standards of 'scientificity', they deal with what readers can find of use" (1213).

 
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This notion of literature as a process integrally connected with other social processes is a very powerful one for the study of talmudic texts. It enables us to consider how the social meanings produced in the halakhic discussions and innovations that the documents preserve are reproduced in the stories about the Rabbis that the same documents tell. If we can no longer write biographies of Rabbis, which can then be used to explain (even partially) their halakhic interventions (as, for example, the classic biography of Rabbi Akiva by Louis Finkelstein [1964]), we can, it seems, use both halakha and aggada together to write a history of discursive processes and social sites, of communal mechanisms and institutions.
How do we translate this idea into interpretation of texts? Having abandoned the notion that texts simply reflect the intentions of their authors or the extra-textual reality of their referents, what alternative to a purely intra-textual reading remains? The answer lies in an appropriate apprehension of the concept of intertextuality, and particularly the special form of intertextual reading pursued by a group of scholars called the "new historicists." 21
The research paradigm loosely known as the new historicism is more a sensibility than a theory. Indeed, certain of its practitioners have defined themselves explicitly (if somewhat ironically) as being "against theory." 22 Nevertheless, I believe that we can discover one overriding principle that both constitutes the paradigm as a significant theoretical intervention and explains the convergence of sensibility between critics of otherwise very diverse interests and methods. This principle is rejection of the view that literature and art form an autonomous, time-less realm of transcendent value and significance, and concomitantly, promulgation of the conviction that this view is itself the historical, ideological construction of a particular time and place in cultural history. Stated more positively, literature and art are one practice among many by which a culture organizes its production of meaning and values and structures itself. There follow from this hypothesis several postulates:
1. The study of a literary work cannot be pursued in isolation from other concurrent socio-cultural practices.
21. Below, however, I will