On the Margins of Modernism

Decentering Literary Dynamics

Chana Kronfeld

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9780520083462
• eBook ISBN: 9780520914131
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Modernism valorizes the marginal, the exile, the "other"—yet we tend to use writing from the most commonly read European languages (English, French, German) as examples of this marginality. Chana Kronfeld counters these dominant models of marginality by looking instead at modernist poetry written in two decentered languages, Hebrew and Yiddish. What results is a bold new model of literary dynamics, one less tied to canonical norms, less limited geographically, and less in danger of universalizing the experience of minority writers. Kronfeld examines the interpenetrations of modernist groupings through examples of Hebrew and Yiddish poetry in Europe, the U.S., and Israel. Her discussions of Amichai, Fogel, Raab, Halpern, Markish, Hofshteyn, and Sutskever will be welcomed by students of modernism in general and Hebrew and Yiddish literatures in particular.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• INTRODUCTION Minor Modernisms Beyond Deleuze and Guattari
• PART ONE. Modeling Modernism
• CHAPTER 1. Modernism through the Margins From Definitions to Prototypes
• CHAPTER 2. Theory / History Between Period and Genre; Or, What to Do with a Literary Trend?
• CHAPTER 3. Behind the Graph and the Map Literary Historiography and the Hebrew Margins of Modernism
• PART TWO. Stylistic Prototypes
• CHAPTER 4. Beyond Language Pangs The Possibility of Modernist Hebrew Poetry
• CHAPTER 5. Theories of Allusion and Imagist Intertextuality When Iconoclasts Evoke the Bible
• CHAPTER 6. Yehuda Amichai On the Boundaries of Affiliation
• CHAPTER 7. David Fogel and Moyshe Leyb Halpern Liminal Moments in Hebrew and Yiddish Literary History
• CHAPTER 8. The Yiddish Poem Itself Readings in Halpern, Markish, Hofshteyn, and Sutzkever
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index