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Zusatztext "I am not exaggerating when I say that this is a book a whole generation-on two continents-has been waiting for. It is the only study of its kind in English! and it resolves and transcends decades of controversy and misguided readings of Amichai's poetry in Israel and elsewhere." Informationen zum Autor Chana Kronfeld is Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of On the Margins of Modernism: Decentering Literary Dynamics (winner of the MLA Scaglione Prize for Best Book in Comparative Literary Studies) and the co-translator (with Chana Bloch) of Yehuda Amichai's Open Closed Open: Poems (winner of the PEN Translation Prize). Kronfeld is the recipient of the Akavyahu Lifetime Achievement Award for her studies of Hebrew and Yiddish poetry. Klappentext Chana Kronfeld is Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of On the Margins of Modernism: Decentering Literary Dynamics (winner of the MLA Scaglione Prize for Best Book in Comparative Literary Studies) and the co-translator (with Chana Bloch) of Yehuda Amichai's Open Closed Open: Poems (winner of the PEN Translation Prize). Kronfeld is the recipient of the Akavyahu Lifetime Achievement Award for her studies of Hebrew and Yiddish poetry. Zusammenfassung The Full Severity of Compassion is both a modular retrospective of Yehuda Amichai's poetric project and a reassessment–by attending closely to the theory embedded in the poetry–of major issues in contemporary literary studies, from the politics of form to radical allusion, and from metaphor to translation. Inhaltsverzeichnis Contents and Abstracts Introduction: "Be an Other's, Be an Other": A Personal Perspective chapter abstract A biography of Yehuda Amichai and the arc of his life in poetry is interwoven with a discussion of autobiography and its role in lending Amichai's avant-garde lyric a deceptively simple impression. 1 Beyond Appropriation: Reclaiming the Revolutionary Amichai chapter abstract This chapter traces Amichai's reception and appropriation as a "national poet" of official celebrations in Israel and as a poet of simple religiosity in the Jewish American synagogue. Arguing that revolutionary poetry is too "dangerous" to be left alone to do its work, the chapter interrogates these misreadings not as mistakes that should be corrected but as informative expressions of hegemonic processes of canon formation. By contrast, the chapter illustrates the wrath with which early critics received his work, labeling it revolutionary and heretical – all this in an attempt to restore our ability to perceive these features in Amichai's poetry even today, despite its massive cooptation. The chapter also critiques the over-emphasis on thematics in literary studies, theorizing from Amichai's work a model for the politics of poetic form. 2 "In the Narrow Between": Amichai's Poetic System chapter abstract Simplicity and accessibility are for Amichai serious ethical principles, guidelines for a poetic effect that are part of the fabric of everyday life, not just the mark of "a playful poet" writing "easy" verse who has "no worldview," as some scholars have argued, mistaking his egalitarian imperative for a lack of philosophica...
