The famous scholar Benjamin Harshav has famously described Israeli statehood as the end result of an “ideology that created a language that forged a society that became a state.” The course aims to gain an overall impression of the creation of Hebrew Modern Literature from its post biblical fundaments through the middle ages right until contemporary Israeli culture and literature, both in verse and prose. Central issues that will be discussed in class: what's between Hebrew literature, Jewish literatures and Israeli literature? What's between the Hebrew tongue and its use by political and sociological agents? Letters, literature and the imagination and creation of territory; the building of a nation; Hebrew letters and political theology; Midrash and Jewish thought and cross-sectional topics, Palestinain and Mizrahi identity and trauma and nationhood.

Core reading

1. Carmi (editor and translator), The Penguin Book of Hebrew Verse, Penguin Books, 1981.

Cole Peter (editor and translator), The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain, 950-1492, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007.

Michael Guzman, The Politics of Canonicity, Lines of Resistance in Modernist Hebrew Poetry, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003.