Description
Book SynopsisA Palestinian-Israeli poet declares a new state whose language, "Homelandic," is a combination of Arabic and Hebrew. A Jewish-Israeli author imagines a "language plague" that infects young Hebrew speakers with old world accents, and sends the narrator in search of his Arabic heritage. In Poetic Trespass, Lital Levy brings together such startling vi
Trade ReviewCo-Winner of the 2014 MLA Prize for a First Book, Modern Language Association Winner of the 2014 Salo Baron Prize, American Academy for Jewish Research Co-Winner of the 2014 Jordan Schnitzer Book Award in Jewish Literature and Linguistics, Association for Jewish Studies "Poetic Trespass is a major achievement."--Anna Bernard, Journal of the Society for Contemporary Thought and the Islamicate World "An important and engaging work that will be of great interest to scholars concerned with Israel/Palestine, Arabic and Hebrew literatures as well as Mizrahi studies."--Pelle Valentin Olsen, Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication
Table of ContentsIllustrations ix Acknowledgments xi Note on Transliteration and Translation xv Introduction: The No-Man's-Land of Language 1 PART I HISTORICAL VISIONS AND ELISIONS 1 From the "Hebrew Bedouin" to "Israeli Arabic": Arabic, Hebrew, and the Creation of Israeli Culture 21 2 Bialik and the Sephardim: The Ethnic Encoding of Modern Hebrew Literature 60 PART II BILINGUAL ENTANGLEMENTS 3 Exchanging Words: Arabic Writing in Israel and the Poetics of Misunderstanding 105 4 Palestinian Midrash: Toward a Postnational Poetics of Hebrew Verse 141 PART III AFTERLIVES OF LANGUAGE 5 "Along Came the Knife of Hebrew and Cut Us in Two": Language in Mizrahi Fiction, 1964-2010 189 6 "So You Won't Understand a Word": Secret Languages, Pseudo-languages, and the Presence of Absence 238 Conclusion: Bloody Hope: The Intertextual Afterword of Salman Masalha and Saul Tchernichowsky 285 Bibliography 299 Index 329
