Michael Gluzman. The Politics of Canonicity: Lines of Resistance in Modernist Hebrew Poetry. Contraversions: Jews and Other Differences. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. xiv, 250 pp.

AJS Review ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 179-181
Author(s):  
Chanita Goodblatt
Keyword(s):  
Full Range ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Hebrew Literature ◽  
Primary Interest ◽  
Hebrew Poetry ◽  
Modern Hebrew ◽  
Private And Public ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Leah Goldberg

In his epilogue to The Politics of Canonicity, Michael Gluzman has aptly delineated the parameters of this book, by writing that it “originates from the American debate on canon formation and cultural wars that predominated academic discourse during my years at University of California, Berkeley” (p. 181). This statement firmly sets its author within a critical context that auspiciously brings a wider literary discourse, such as that sustained by Chana Kronfeld and Hannan Hever, into the realm of modern Hebrew poetry. In particular, The Politics of Canonicity is identified by its publication in the series entitled Contraversions: Jews and Other Differences, which has a primary interest in the ongoing redefinition of Jewish identity and culture, specifically involving issues of gender, modernity, and politics. The Politics of Canonicity is effectively divided into two parts. In the first, comprising Chapters 1 and 2, Gluzman provides the intellectual and historical context for the interwoven formation of national identity and the literary canon in modern Hebrew literature. In particular, in Chapter 1 he relates the story of the 1896–1897 debate between Ahad Ha'am and Mikha Yosef Berdichevsky, arguing that it produced a dominant and regulative paradigm of Hebrew literature that integrates the private and public, the aesthetic and the national. In the second chapter, Gluzman discusses the way in which Hebrew modernism created a counterpoint to international modernism's glorification of exile. He discusses a full range of premodernist and modernist Hebrew poets—Shaul Tchernichovsky, Avigdor Hameiri, Avraham Shlonsky, Noach Stern, and Leah Goldberg—in order to underline their resistance to “the idea of exile as a literary privilege or as an inherently Jewish vocation” (p. 37), a resistance which Gluzman determines as calling into question “the critical tendency to read modernist practices as essentially antinationalist” (p. 37).

Shlonsky, Abraham (1900–1973)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ari Ofengenden
Keyword(s):  
Hebrew Literature ◽  
Modernist Poetry ◽  
Hebrew Poetry ◽  
Tel Aviv ◽  
Literary Magazine ◽  
Modern Hebrew ◽  
Unique Style

Abraham Shlonsky can be regarded as the main architect of modern Hebrew poetry. He was born in 1900 to a socialist revolutionary mother and a Chassidic father in Kryukovo (East Ukraine) and emigrated to Palestine in 1922. Shlonsky first worked in agriculture as a pioneer at the kibbutz Ein Harod. He later moved to Tel Aviv to become a journalist, editor and translator. Early on Shlonsky rebelled against the romantic nationalism of Hayim Nahman Bialik and created a modernist symbolist style of poetry that was hegemonic in Israel from the 1930s until the early 1960s. Shlonsky’s poetry has had a decisive impact on Hebrew literature; more than any other poet, he is responsible for the transition from romantic to modernist poetry. The unique style that he developed became prevalent in Hebrew poetry from the 1930s until the early 1960s. More recently (2005), this style has experienced a renaissance via an influential group of young poets associated with the literary magazine Ho.

Non-biblical Tonalities

2020 ◽  
pp. 15-92
Author(s):  
Assaf Shelleg
Keyword(s):  
Hebrew Poetry ◽  
The Bible ◽  
National Allegory ◽  
Modern Hebrew ◽  
Biblical Literalism ◽  
1 Samuel ◽  
Hebrew Culture ◽  
Cultural Networks

Chapter 1 revolves around Josef Tal’s 1955 opera Saul at Ein-Dor, whose libretto is word-for-word the narrative given in 1 Samuel 28. Through this opera the chapter examines the actualization of the Bible in Hebrew culture and its promotion of territorial nationalism, as well as the artistic formulations that contested the literalist way Zionists had selectively appropriated the Bible. Under the purview of what Anita Shapira terms “biblical literalism” and Jean-Christophe Attias calls “Zionist biblocentrism,” the literal reading of selected texts facilitated a national allegory that actualized tropes of return, of redemption, and of territorial expansionism. To understand the cultural networks activated by such readings, the chapter studies the works of Ben-Haim, Orgad, Boskovich, and additional works by Tal. A parallel discussion on the portrayals of King Saul in modern Hebrew poetry complements the entire narrative, and a thorough analysis of the post-tonal devices in Tal’s opera concludes the chapter.

Hebrew Literature and Music

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michal Ben-Horin
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Central Component ◽  
Hebrew Literature ◽  
Prose Fiction ◽  
Hebrew Poetry ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Narrative Structures ◽  
Romantic Era ◽  
Modern Hebrew ◽  
The Relationship

Literature and music have a long entwined history. Since antiquity, music and poetry (a crystalized form of “literature” or the “poetic”) have been regarded as “twin sisters,” constituting a productive source of creation and inspiration. In the Romantic era (especially German Romanticism) this affinity reached one of its peaks, as demonstrated in the emergence of symbiotic musical-poetic forms and modes of aesthetic expression. From the perspective of cultural history, however, the scope of this relationship is even wider and can be traced back to the overlap between language and music. The compatibility of music and poetry has produced a range of scholarship elaborated in various traditions of knowledge and research disciplines, including semiotics, poetics, aesthetics, musicology, cultural studies, and critical theory. It is well known that sound is a central component of both musical and verbal sign systems. What happens to this sound, however, when we read a story? Moreover, whereas the connection between sounds and poems seems obvious, as shown in the field of research called prosody, which explores various phenomena such as rhythm and alliteration, metric and intonation, the connection between sounds and prose fiction is less obvious. This article focuses on a body of works—theoretical, methodological, and textual—dedicated to the exploration of literature and music relationships in general, in order to understand the relationship between Hebrew literature (including poetry, but mainly prose fiction) and music in particular. Compared to other national literatures such as French, English, and above all German, the scholarly study of Hebrew literature and music is relatively young. Central domains of this study are the employment of sound and acoustic components (i.e., prosody), the incorporation of musical intertexts (i.e., texts that are connected to the realm of music, such as musical terminology, descriptions of music playing, allusions to musical repertoire and themes), and the shaping of analogies between musical forms and narrative structures (i.e., the sonata form or the counterpoint). Hebrew literature also has a history, of course, from the Bible and other ancient texts, to medieval Hebrew poetry, and up to modern Hebrew and contemporary Israeli literature. Viewing these poetic traditions through the specific lens of language/literature and music relationships, an emerging field of study dealing with representations of music in modern Hebrew and Israeli prose fiction will be discussed, alongside scholarship on the relationship between Hebrew poetry and music.

Class, Control, and Classical Music

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Bull
Keyword(s):  
Music Education ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Classical Music ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
Middle Classes ◽  
Class Culture ◽  
White Middle Class ◽  
Music Ensembles ◽  
The Aesthetic

Through an ethnographic study of young people playing and singing in classical music ensembles in the south of England, this book analyses why classical music in England is predominantly practiced by white middle-class people. It describes four ‘articulations’ or associations between the middle classes and classical music. Firstly, its repertoire requires formal modes of social organization that can be contrasted with the anti-pretentious, informal, dialogic modes of participation found in many forms of working-class culture. Secondly, its modes of embodiment reproduce classed values such as female respectability. Thirdly, an imaginative dimension of bourgeois selfhood can be read from classical music’s practices. Finally, its aesthetic of detail, precision, and ‘getting it right’ requires a long-term investment that is more possible, and makes more sense, for middle- and upper-class families. Through these arguments, the book reframes existing debates on gender and classical music participation in light of the classed gender identities that the study revealed. Overall, the book suggests that inequalities in cultural production can be understood through examining the practices that are used to create a particular aesthetic. It argues that the ideology of the ‘autonomy’ of classical music from social concerns needs to be examined in historical context as part of the classed legacy of classical music’s past. It describes how the aesthetic of classical music is a mechanism through which the middle classes carry out boundary-drawing around their protected spaces, and within these spaces, young people’s participation in classical music education cultivates a socially valued form of self-hood.

St Gregory of Nyssa

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Anthony McGuckin
Keyword(s):  
Historical Context ◽  
Family Members ◽  
General Outline ◽  
Gregory Of Nyssa ◽  
Christian Leaders ◽  
Close Family

Chapter 1 gives Biographical background and studies the historical context(s) of Gregory of Nyssa and his close family members, situating them as aristocratic and long-established Christian leaders of the Cappadocian area. It offers along with the course of Gregory’s Vita a general outline of the main philosophical and religious controversies of his era, particularly his ecclesiastical involvement in the Neo-Nicene apologetical movement associated with the leadership of his brother Basil (of Caesarea), which he himself inherited in Cappadocia, with imperial approval, after 380. It concludes with a review of Gregory’s significance as author: in terms of his style as a writer, his work as an exegete, his body of spiritual teaching, and lastly, the manner in which his reputation waxed and waned from antiquity to the present.

Modern Hebrew Poetry

1982 ◽  
Vol 56 (1) ◽  
pp. 173
Author(s):  
Gila Ramras-Rauch ◽  
Bernhard Frank
Keyword(s):  
Hebrew Poetry ◽  
Modern Hebrew

Cyclopedia of Modern Hebrew Literature, Vol. I

1967 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 64
Author(s):  
Abraham I. Katsh ◽  
G. Kressel
Keyword(s):  
Hebrew Literature ◽  
Modern Hebrew
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