Dealing with a Literary Estate: Methodological Issues Encountered in Organizing Josef Mundi's Estate as a Case Study

Abstract:In the humanities literature concerning research questions, little attention is paid to methodological issues. This paper seeks to help fill that gap by presenting a case study: the problems that arose when working on the estate of Josef Mundi, which we received in 2016. We had to make numerous decisions regarding, among other things, chronological, chronotropic, textual, and biographical issues. The plays had to be dated and arranged in chronological order, the parent text among the various versions of the same play had to be determined, and Mundi's artistic development in terms of movements, genres, and themes had to be traced.Some of the problems we encountered, and the solutions we found, are illustrated here by three plays from different periods: "The Razor" from 1977, "The Messiah: The Rise and Fall of Shabbetai Zvi" (1982), and "Peep Show," which was never published or staged.