Chana Kronfeld

The Full Severity of Compassion

The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai

• Gebundenes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

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.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Seitenzahl: 416
• Erscheinungstermin: 9. Dezember 2015
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 239mm x 160mm x 28mm
• Gewicht: 658g
• ISBN-13: 9780804782951
• ISBN-10: 0804782954
• Artikelnr.: 42793658

Autorenporträt

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.

Inhaltsangabe

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.
1Beyond 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 philosophical gravitas. Poetic philosophy is
revealed in the process to be a feature of stylistics as of thematics.
Chapter Two outlines the major principles that underlie Amichai's poetic
philosophy, focusing on the state of "in-between-ness" as the privileged
yet endangered site of the poetic subjects-cum-ordinary human beings. This
sets the stage for an array of systematic correlations between liminality
as the governing feature of Amichai's poetic worldview and many of his
signature rhetorical practices discussed throughout the book, such as
juxtaposition, intertextuality and metaphor, which map two domains together
without ignoring their distinctness.
3"I Want to Mix Up the Bible": Intertextuality, Agency, and the Poetics of
Radical Allusion
chapter abstract
Famous for his iconoclastic allusions to sacred texts, Amichai is able to
subject these sources to irreverent rewritings without producing a hermetic
poetry. His intertextual collage co-exists with lucidity and readerly
accessibility. The chapter retheorizes intertextuality through Amichai's
rhetorical practice to call into question contemporary Western theories in
the field. Using Amichai's unique combination of Jewish and matrilineal
notions of literary tradition and (inter)textual exegesis, the chapter
engages critically with Harold Bloom's model of "the anxiety of influence,"
and its bourgeois-individualist, male-Oedipal struggle between "strong
poets;" it also critiques the poststructuralist view of intertextuality as
"an anonymous tissue of citations" through Amichai's insistence on a
historically inflected human agent as central to any process of recycling a
culture's texts. This agency, though censored and limited, offers a
possibility of resisting interpellation by the act of changing the words of
its subjugating command, in Judith Butler's terms.
4Celebrating Mediation: The Poet as Translator
chapter abstract
Amichai sees the work of translation as a model for the poet's own
in-between-ness, as well as for the translator/poet's inescapable
secondariness. That the poet, like the translator, plays an immanently
mediational position is a source of comfort rather than anxiety. This view
of the poet's role sheds new light on contemporary theories of translation
as cultural negotiation and their focus on asymmetrical power relations
between source and target language. Amichai's poems about translation are
read as celebrating the imperfect "recycling of words," describing
translation as the epitome of all intertextuality, and ultimately of the
creative process itself. Through Amichai's ecology of language, the chapter
interrogates the ideological blind spots behind the numerous
mistranslations that Amichai has been subjected to, not in order to
advocate some correct rendition, but rather to suggest the ways in which
they express what Gayatri Spivak has termed "the politics of translation."
5Living on the Hyphen: The Necessary Metaphor
chapter abstract
Metaphor embodies Amichai's principle of "in-between-ness" and has a
significance within his poetic system that far exceeds the rhetorical.
Chapter Five focuses on metaphor as the central marker of liminality, the
hyphen of survival and resistance: it must never erase that hyphen, the
marker of the disparate domains which it brings together (hence his
preference for simile), even while it strives to make the gap between these
domains productive of meaning. The ways Amichai's metaphors resist the
erasure of difference critiques the vestiges of poststructuralist views,
and offer an alternative model based on a historicized, context-sensitive
reworking of prototype semantics. Amichai's images, while as novel and
surprising as those of any 17th-century metaphysical poet, nevertheless
strike us as completely "right," as visually and experientially familiar,
because of their perceptually primary basis and the extensive and rigorous
mapping they provide for the distant source and target domains.
6Double Agency: Amichai and the Problematics of Generational Literary
Historiography
chapter abstract
Amichai extols the poet's freedom to oscillate between generational trends
and poetic styles, while cherishing his outsider role and calling into
question the underlying assumptions behind the generational model itself.
His self-description as an inter-generational "double-agent" has presented
a real problem for normative Hebrew literary historiography, with its
teleological, unidirectional notions of a literary lineage, and has
occasioned an impassioned debate. This literally subversive statement also
articulates Amichai's post-Marxist critique of teleological historicism,
his aversion to chronological order; and his preference for a simultaneous
representation of personal and collective temporalities either as a
fragmentary "archeology of the self" or as a fault-line geology. The
chapter explores Amichai's resistance to the normative historiographic
narrative of Hebrew literature, as well his refusal to reject his literary
predecessors, a rejection prescribed in the manifestos of the
self-proclaimed leader of the Statehood Generation, Natan Zach.