End Date : October 10, 7:30 pm
617 Kent Hall
Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies
Institute for Comparative Literature and Society
Join IIJS for the Inaugural Prof. Dan Miron Lecture in Hebrew Literature with Prof. Chana Kronfeld.
The Land-as-Woman is one of the most deeply rooted metaphorical systems in Jewish as well as Western and Middle-Eastern cultures, used to support the discourses of colonialism and nationalism throughout history. It has its origins in the Hebrew Bible, where the male prophet, ventriloquizing a male God, addresses Zion as his beloved – but more often as his unfaithful – wife, thus linking idolatry with adultery and whoredom (zenut). In modern Hebrew poetry, the male poet lays claim to this biblical trope, but now within a secular, nationalist “conquest” of the Land-as-Woman. Prof. Kronfeld explores what happens when modernist women poets critique a tradition that views women always as metaphors, never as literal subjects. Kronfeld describes the revolutionary work of modern Hebrew women poets who develop a new erotics of address to the land that calls into question patriarchal models of conquest and subjugation.
Co-sponsored by the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society.
Supported by the generosity of the Knapp Family Foundation.
Chana Kronfeld is a professor of Hebrew and comparative literature at the University of California Berkeley. Professor Kronfeld is the author of On the Margins of Modernism: Decentering Literary Dynamics which won the MLA Scaglione Prize in 1996 for Best Book in Comparative Literary Studies. Her co-translation (with Chana Bloch) of Yehuda Amichai’s Open Closed Open won the PEN Translation Prize. She is the recipient (with Chana Bloch) of the top 2005-6 National Endowment for the Arts award for the translation and annotated edition of Hovering at a Low Altitude: The Collected Poetry of Dahlia Ravikovitch (N.Y. W.W. Norton, 2009). She’s the author, most recently, of The Full Severity of Compassion: The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai (Stanford, 2016). Her contributions (with Chana Bloch) to Robert Alter’s The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2015) include an expanded edition of Open Closed Open. Benjamin Harshav’s Hebrew-Yiddish volume, Kol Ha-Shirim, is her most recent collaborative project (with Udi Hrushovski; Carmel, 2017).
Additional Information: Seating will be available on a first-come first-served basis. Doors open at 5:45 pm.
