From Continuity to Contiguity

by Miron, Dan

• ISBN13: 9780804762007
• ISBN10: 0804762007
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-07-19
• Publisher: Stanford Univ Pr

Summary

Dan Miron--widely recognized as one of the world's leading experts on modern Jewish literatures--begins this study by surveying and critiquing previous attempts to define a common denominator unifying the various modern Jewish literatures. He argues that these prior efforts have all been trapped by the need to see these literatures as a continuum. Miron seeks to break through this impasse by acknowledging discontinuity as the staple characteristic of modern Jewish writing. These literatures instead form a complex of independent, yet touching, components related through contiguity.From Continuity to Contiguityoffers original insights into modern Hebrew, Yiddish, and other Jewish literatures, including a new interpretation of Franz Kafka's place within them and discussions of Sholem Aleichem, Sh. Y. Abramovitsh, Akhad ha'am, M. Y. Berditshevsky, Kh. N. Bialik, and Y. L. Peretz.

Author Biography

Dan Miron is Leonard Kay Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He is the author more than thirty volumes of literary scholarship and criticism in Hebrew, Yiddish, English, German, and Russian.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. ix
Note on Transliteration	p. xiii
From Continuity to Contiguity
Prologue: Old Questions; Do They Deserve New Answers?	p. 3
The "Old" Jewish Literary Discourse and the Illusion of Israeli Cultural Normalcy	p. 20
Modern Jewish Literary Thinking: The Enlightenment and the Advent of Nationalism	p. 57
The Jewish Literary Renaissance at the Turn of the Nineteenth and the Beginning of the Twentieth Centuries	p. 90
The Inter-Bellum Decades: Hebrew	p. 134
The Inter-Bellum Decades: Yiddish; Issues of Cultural Continuity in Revolutionary Times	p. 171
Vertical and Horizontal Continuities and Discontinuities	p. 204
Dov Sadan's Concept of Sifrut Yisra'el, and Why the "Old" Jewish Literary Discourse Became Irrelevant	p. 246
Jewish Diglossias-Differential and Integral	p. 278
Contiguity: Franz Kafka's Standing Within the Modern Jewish Literary Complex	p. 303
Contiguity: How Kafka and Sholem Aleichem Are Contiguous	p. 351
Conclusion: Toward a New Jewish Literary Thinking	p. 403
Abramovitsh and His Mendele Between Hebrew and Yiddish
Breathing Through Both Nostrils? Shalom Ya'akov Abramovitsh Between Hebrew and Yiddish	p. 421
Notes	p. 499
Index	p. 530
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