Yael Halevi-Wise
19th-century novels (especially Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Charlotte Bront毛, George Eliot, Benjamin Disraeli);聽history of the novel as a literary form; comparative analyses of the novel as a genre across time and different cultures; cultural representations of Jews and Judaism in modern literary fiction.
Since I began to work professionally on literature in the 1990s, my main motivation has been to understand how the novel 鈥渨orks鈥� as a genre and how it morphs over time across different cultures. My first book,聽(Prager/Bloomsbury, 1996) enabled me to create a foundation for my understanding of literary forms as an interactive process that arises out of dynamic arguments among storyteller and audiences with specific cultural expectations about their storytelling in their respective milieus. Thanks to these arguments, their expectations change and artistic forms are continuously transformed. I examined these processes in several literary traditions, including 19th C. England, 17th C. Spain, contemporary Israel, and contemporary Latin America. This range of choices emerged in part from my own multicultural background as an Israeli who grew up in Mexico and studied English and Comparative Literature in Israel and the United States. In 2012, I spearheaded a volume about representations of (Stanford, 2012). More recently in (Penn State UP, 2020) I worked on the entire oeuvre of this leading Israeli novelist and public intellectual, who recently passed away (z鈥漧). I continue at the same time to be fascinated by the works of the great 19th Century English novelists, especially Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, Charlotte Br枚nte, George Eliot, and most recently have become more interested in Benjamin Disraeli.
Ph.D. (Princeton)
M.A. (Georgetown)聽
B.A. (Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
Impact of ChatGPT on our teaching; Charles Dickens鈥檚 narrative techniques; A.B. Yehoshua in a comparative context, e.g. vis-脿-vis Faulkner, Dickens, Agnon, Kafka, Joyce, Woolf, Camus.
Books
(Penn State University Press, 2020)
(Stanford University Press, 2012)
(Praeger/Bloomsbury Press, 2003)
Articles and Book Chapters
鈥淭he Mystery of Edwin Drood,鈥� 颈苍听A Companion to Charles Dickens-Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture, Ed. David Paroissien (forthcoming).
鈥淎. B. Yehoshua and the Novel of Vocation,鈥� Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History 37 (2019): 688-710 (special issue in memory of Alan Mintz z鈥漧).
鈥淗ebrew Literature in the 鈥榃orld Republic of Letters鈥�: Translation and Reception, 1918-2018鈥� (with Madeleine Gottesman), Israel Studies Review 33.2 (2018): 1-25.
"The Watchman鈥檚 Stance in A. B. Yehoshua鈥檚 Fiction," Hebrew Studies 58 (2017): 357-382.
"Holidays in A. B. Yeshoshua's Opus and Ethos," Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal Studies 35.2 (2017): 55-80.
鈥淯nflattening Mrs. Micawber,鈥� Dickens Quarterly 33.3 (2016): 201-222.
鈥淟a formation d鈥檜ne identit茅 isra茅lienne dans l鈥櫯搖vre de A.B. Yehoshua.鈥� Une journ茅e avec Avraham Yehoshua. La c茅libataire, revue Lacanienne 30 (2016): 161-172.
鈥溾�� AJS Review 38.2 (2014): 395-416.
鈥溾�� Sephardic Horizons 4.1 (2014).
鈥淭he Life and Times of the Picaro-Converso from Spain to Latin America,鈥� in Sephardism, Ed. Y. Halevi-Wise (Stanford UP, 2012):143-66.
"A Taste of Sepharad from the Suburbs of Mexico: Rosa Nissan's Ladino in Novia que te vea and Hisho que te nazca," in Sephardic Identity in the Americas, Ed. M. Bejarano and E. Aizenberg (Syracuse UP, 2012).
"Reading Agnon's In the Prime of Her Life in Light of Freud's Dora," Jewish Quarterly Review 98.1 (2008): 29-40.
"'The Double Triangle Paradigm' in Hebrew Fiction: National Redemption in Bigenerational Love Triangles from Agnon to Oz," Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History 26 (2006): 309-343.
"Ethics and Aesthetics of Memory in Contemporary Mizrahi Literature," The Journal of Israeli History 20.1 (Spring 2001): 49-66.
"Little Dorrit's Story," The Dickensian 94.446 (1998): 184-94.
"The Rhetoric of Silence in Conrad's Lord Jim," Anatomies of Silence (1998): 98-105.
"Storytelling in Like Water for Chocolate," The Other Mirror (1997): 123-131.
"The Play within the Play as a Model of Fictionality," Mundos de Ficcion II (1996): 899-91.
Reviews
鈥淶eruya Shalev鈥檚 Pain,鈥� Words Without Borders (January 2020)
Gilead Moragh, 鈥淐ompassion and Fury: On the Fiction of A. B. Yehoshua,鈥� Hebrew Studies 56 (2015): 101-104.
Dan Miron, From Continuity to Contiguity: Toward a New Jewish Literary Thinking, Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas. 11.1 (2013): 173-77.
Deborah Starr and Sasson Somekh, Eds. , Sephardic Horizons 2.1 (Winter 2012).
Yael Feldman, , Shofar 30.4 (2012).
Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, Booking Passage: Exile and Homecoming in the Modern Jewish Imagination. Criticism 42.4 (2000): 484-87.
- Visiting Professor, Department of Hebrew and Comparative Literature, Haifa University, Spring 2016
- Visiting Professor, Paris INALCO, Fall 2015
- SSHRC Standard Research Grant, 2006-09
- FQRSC Programme pour l'茅tablissement de nouveau professeurs-chercheurs, 2006-09
- Lady Davis Fellowship, 2008-09
- W. and F. Hewlett Foundation, "Strengthening Interdisciplinary Connections", 2001
- Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship, 2000-01
- Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, 2007, 2000
1) I particularly welcome students interested in thinking about the novel as a genre: its characteristics in any given period - esp. 19th C. - and its transformations across history and different cultures. 2) I also enjoy supervising creative writing theses, an option that enables students to produce original primary accompanied by a serious scholarly assessment of literary voice, structure and form. 3) As a joint professor of Jewish Studies and English, I鈥檓 able to assist students interested in unpacking the fraught history of literary representation of Jews and Judaism in the modern imagination.
Brandeis University
Cornell University
Princeton University