Description
Book SynopsisTrade 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
