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"A remarkable study. . . . The first book of its kind and essential for any future discussion of modernism and its embattled boundaries."—Françoise Meltzer, author of Hot Property
"One of the very best books of literary criticism, literary scholarship, or literary theory I have ever read. . . . It illuminates interrelationships between historical studies and theory in any humanist discipline."—Menachim Brinker, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
"A milestone in the study of modern Jewish literature. It seriously engages and recontextualizes all the scholarship that came before, and by so doing sets it on a new course: applying a rigorous definition of modernism yet insistent upon methodological diversity; deeply grounded in Hebrew culture yet unabashedly diaspora-centered. This is not a book that readers will take lightly."—David G. Roskies, author of Against the Apocalypse
List of contents
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INTRODUCTION: MINOR MODERNISMS:BEYOND DELEUZE AND GUATTARI
PART ONE: MODELING MODERNISM
1
Modernism through the Margins: From Definitions to Prototypes
2
Theory /History: Between Period and Genre; Or, What to Do with a Literary Trend?
3
Behind the Graph and the Map:Literary Historiography and the Hebrew Margins of Modernism
PART TWO: STYLISTIC PROTOTYPES
4
Beyond Language Pangs: The Possibility of Modernist Hebrew Poetry
5
Theories of Allusion and Imagist Intertextuality:When Iconoclasts Evoke the Bible
PART THREE: PARAGONS FROM THE PERIPHERY
6
Yehuda Amichai: On the Boundaries of Affiliation
7
David Fogel and Moyshe Leyb Halpern: Liminal Moments in Hebrew and Yiddish Literary History
8
The Yiddish Poem Itself: Readings in Halpern, Markish, Hofshteyn, and Sutzkever
CONCLUSION: MARGINAL PROTOTYPES,PROTOTYPICAL MARGINS
NOTES
WORKS CITED
INDEX
About the author
Chana Kronfeld is Associate Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the coeditor of David Fogel: The Emergence of Hebrew Modernism (1993).
Summary
This text counters dominant models of marginality by looking at modernist poetry written in two decentred languages, Hebrew and Yiddish. What results is a model of literary dynamics, one less tied to canonical norms, less limited geographically and less likely to universalize minority experiences.
