A Palestinian-Israeli poet declares a new state whose language, "Homelandic," is a combination of Arabic and Hebrew. A Jewish-Israeli author imagines a "language plague" that infects young Hebrew speakers with old world accents, and sends the narrator in search of his Arabic heritage. In Poetic Trespass, Lital Levy brings together such startling visions to offer the first in-depth study of the relationship between Hebrew and Arabic in the literature and culture of Israel/Palestine. More than that, she presents a captivating portrait of the literary imagination's power to transgress political boundaries and transform ideas about language and belonging. Blending history and literature, Poetic Trespass traces the interwoven life of Arabic and Hebrew in Israel/Palestine from the turn of the twentieth century to the present, exposing the two languages' intimate entanglements in contemporary works of prose, poetry, film, and visual art by both Palestinian and Jewish citizens of Israel. In a context where intense political and social pressures work to identify Jews with Hebrew and Palestinians with Arabic, Levy finds writers who have boldly crossed over this divide to create literature in the language of their "other," as well as writers who bring the two languages into dialogue to rewrite them from within. Exploring such acts of poetic trespass, Levy introduces new readings of canonical and lesser-known authors, including Emile Habiby, Hayyim Nahman Bialik, Anton Shammas, Saul Tchernichowsky, Samir Naqqash, Ronit Matalon, Salman Masalha, A. B. Yehoshua, and Almog Behar. By revealing uncommon visions of what it means to write in Arabic and Hebrew, Poetic Trespass will change the way we understand literature and culture in the shadow of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Literary Nonfiction. Using his Denver apartment as a central locale, Erik Anderson walked a path that traced the letters Pastoral between February and March 2007. Navigating the various curves and corners of the city streets, Anderson charts the experiences of a writer in a man-made environment. Explorative, adventurous, and insightful, Anderson's meditations serve as a compelling social and aesthetic commentary.

This handbook addresses Chaucer's poetry in the context of several disciplines, including late medieval philosophy and science, Mediterranean culture, comparative European literature, vernacular theology and popular devotion.

Four striking and novel textual studies of major literary figures and emergent authors. Selected from Cixous's seminars taught between 1980 and 1986 at the Universite de Paris VIII (Saint-Denis) and at the College International de Philosphie, the texts chronicle the French intellectual scene with its shifting tastes over the decade following May 1968. Edited, translated, and introduced by Verena Andermatt Conley. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

“Makes a persuasive argument” that gothic ideas “play a vital role in how Hebrew writers have confronted history, culture, and politics.” —Robert Alter, author of Hebrew and Modernity Sinister tales written since the early twentieth century by the foremost Hebrew authors, including S.Y. Agnon, Leah Goldberg, and Amos Oz, reveal a darkness at the foundation of Hebrew culture. The ghosts of a murdered Talmud scholar and his kidnapped bride rise from their graves for a nocturnal dance of death; a girl hidden by a count in a secret chamber of an Eastern European castle emerges to find that, unbeknownst to her, World War II ended years earlier; a man recounts the act of incest that would shape a trajectory of personal and national history. Reading these works together with central British and American gothic texts, Karen Grumberg illustrates that modern Hebrew literature has regularly appropriated key gothic ideas to help conceptualize the Jewish relationship to the past and, more broadly, to time. She explores why these authors were drawn to the gothic, originally a European mode associated with antisemitism, and how they use it to challenge assumptions about power and powerlessness, vulnerability and violence, and to shape modern Hebrew culture. Grumberg provides an original perspective on Hebrew literary engagement with history and sheds new light on the tensions that continue to characterize contemporary Israeli cultural and political rhetoric.

In Reading Duncan Reading, thirteen scholars and poets examine, first, what and how the American poet Robert Duncan read and, perforce, what and how he wrote. Harold Bloom wrote of the searing anxiety of influence writers experience as they grapple with the burden of being original, but for Duncan this was another matter altogether. Indeed, according to Stephen Collis, “No other poet has so openly expressed his admiration for and gratitude toward his predecessors.” Part one emphasizes Duncan’s acts of reading, tracing a variety of his derivations—including Sarah Ehlers’s demonstration of how Milton shaped Duncan’s early poetic aspirations, Siobhán Scarry’s unveiling of the many sources (including translation and correspondence) drawn into a single Duncan poem, and Clément Oudart’s exploration of Duncan’s use of “foreign words” to fashion “a language to which no one is native.” In part two, the volume turns to examinations of poets who can be seen to in some way derive from Duncan—and so in turn reveals another angle of Duncan’s derivative poetics. J. P. Craig traces Nathaniel MacKey’s use of Duncan’s “would-be shaman,” Catherine Martin sees Duncan’s influence in Susan Howe’s “development of a poetics where the twin concepts of trespass and ‘permission’ hold comparable sway,” and Ross Hair explores poet Ronald Johnson’s “reading to steal.” These and other essays collected here trace paths of poetic affiliation and affinity and hold them up as provocative possibilities in Duncan’s own inexhaustible work.

Situates the act of critical reading in the context of poetic aesthetics. This volume situates the act of critical reading in the context of poetic aesthetics. Running alongside recent post-structuralist theories, the textuality of such matters as literary discourse, history, media, philosophy and religion has emerged as a focal point of debate in the humanities. The essays here examine how questions of the canon, genres, and transformation of texts challenge the present epistemological situation; taking an interdisciplinary approach to textual readings, their methodology is drawn from a range of literary figures and critics, including Lessing, Kafka, Walter Benjamin, and Derrida. The study also addresses the controversial predicament of subjectivity asone of the key terms in current literary and historical scholarship.