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YESHIVA COLLEGE/ FALL 2009 ENGL 1931H AGGADIC AFFINITIES: TORAH AND THE MODERN

Section 251 MW 5:00 PM CRN: 12875 Belfer CO3A Prof. Adam Zachary Newton aznewton@yu.edu Belfer 517 212.960.5400. x6876 Of. Hrs: T 2:30-4:30

“... one must distrust the almost-the-same (sodium is almost the same as potassium, but with sodium nothing would have happened), the practically identical, the approximate, the or-even, all surrogates, and all patchwork. The differences can be small, but they can lead to radically different consequences, like a railroad's switch points; the chemist's trade consists in good part in being aware of these differences, knowing them close up, and foreseeing their effects. And not only the chemist's trade.” This is a passage from The Periodic Table by the chemist-writer Primo Levi (1919-1987). The counter-axiom rings just (or better, roughly) as true: we should be careful about the widely disparate, the polar opposite, all antinomies, and all dividedness. Being aware of large differences this time, and foreseeing their effects, is a duty also incumbent upon a number of trades, and presents a similar challenge: how exactly do I see two elements in proximity to or distance from one another and how, therefore, do I “bisociate” them (a term coined by Arthur Koestler in The Act of Creation)? In the case of our course, the trade is not that of chemistry per se but rather Humanities, in its plastic and expansive sense: an amalgam of literary discourse (poetry and prose fiction), philosophical essay, textual analysis and commentary, cultural poetics, and intellectual history. But you could, of course, still think of our course as “chemical” insofar as it experiments with several related elements and reflects on their interaction. The two chief elements, reagents to each other’s agent, are what this university, uniquely, calls Torah u’madda, each word naming a different “site” of knowledge, traditions, discourses, and practices. How shall we conceptualize that coupling of their respective worlds and worldviews? As resemblance? As disparity? Or something in-between? What pressure do we put on the conjunction? Does the “u” (and) correlate? Juxtapose? Synthesize? Add or supplement one element to another? (These are all different rhetorical operations.) Does it locate a fence between neighbors, or indicate the vehicle for neighboring? Do we even need the conjunction—what, in other words, if the relation were formulated as TorahMadda (not even a hyphen or a back-slash in sight), thus paralleling or echoing the name of our institution, i.e., “Yeshiva University?” How do set about translating YU’s official motto—particularly its second element (the shoresh is YudDaletAyin connoting ” intelligence, consciousness, knowledge, science, thought”)? Unlike the Latin mottos of many American universities, e.g., Perstare et Praestare, Lux et Veritas, that specify a general effect or purpose with dual imperatives, “Torah u’madda”

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proclaims the work of bridging as a conversation between realms of knowledge, or is it also practice—“ savoir faire,” as they say in French, “knowing-how-to-do”—both “knowing” and “doing” (like Torah and madda themselves) informed by the politics of transmission and institutionalization? Does it matter that both elements are rendered in Hebrew? How might we render them into an alternate discourse, call it “the language of the university?” “Scripture and Knowledge?” “Scripture and Know-How?” (But isn’t “Torah” itself both knowledge AND know-how?) What other formulations can we compose that will help us think through the phrase? Which practices can help us give it body and shape, helping us refine and refract it for ourselves? These are some of the questions we will explore together as its underlying and implicit framework, keeping a weather eye open for the almost-the-same as well as the self-evidently-disparate. That exploration takes shape through the readings we will tackle from week to week and the writing we compose to process them, prompting further reading and continued writing—ein sof davar. We will look particularly at writing and reading as cultural practices that are never simply matters of transparently sending and receiving messages. In the institutional context of an Honors course, for example, writing and reading can also be thought of as “practicings”—dry runs, trial sessions, run-throughs—in short, the sort of expository and creative expression such courses at YU routinely ask of you. But at bottom, this will be a course in watching reading take place, or if you like, reading readers read. Take this example, from the (13th c?) midrashic compilation Yalqut Shimoni (1, 764):

G-d says to Moses, “Do me a favor and tell Aaron about his death, for I am ashamed to tell him.” So Moses rose early in the morning and went over to Aaron’s place. He began calling out, “Aaron, my brother!” Aaron came down to him and asked, “How is it that you have come here so early today?” Moses answered, “There is a matter from the Torah that I was mulling over during the night, and it gave me great difficulty.” Aaron asked, “What is the problem?” Moses answered, “I don’t know what it was—but I do know that it is in the book of Genesis. Bring it, and let us read it. They took the book of Genesis and read it, story by story….

Here, Moses and Aaron stand apart from the action of the last four books of the Pentateuch and act as either each other’s chevruta. As commentator Avivah Zornberg has observed, this midrashic text models for us a way of reading. The word that denotes Moses’s “calling out” (korei) is identical with the word “read (aloud)” which is the action both brothers immediately perform in the story. Acts of reading depend on “calling out for response to a text that itself calls out, summons, and addresses the reader. Essentially, to read is to invite the text to yield up its meanings.” To take, now, an example from the madda side of the equation, even though so many of them are meant to be read against, rather than with, their own grain, Robert Frost’s poems (favorites of homileticists of many stripes, rabbis included) address the same large issue traversing the worlds of Torah and madda. What, they ask, are the duties

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and dilemmas we assume when we invite texts to yield up their meanings? Thus, while the famous poem “Mending Wall” pokes fun at the neighbor’s well-worn cliché “Good fences make good neighbors,” it does not leave the poem’s speaker in the clear, either; the poem wants us to do more than just “choose sides,” but rather to think through the politics of conversation and engagement, as well as our own interpretive agency. Accordingly and in short, this is a course about the textual and hermeneutic imagination, how we engage and converse with, receive, respond to, and re-voice the literary reading we perform in an academic environment whose claims on us are dual. What this course is NOT:

• This is not a course in midrash or what has been called “the midrashic imagination.” • This is not a course in aggada or Torah. • Although we will read selections from books entitled Talmudic Stories and Talmudic

Readings, this is not a course in either “academic Talmud” or “Jewish Studies” (as delimited at Yeshiva College).

• As to the title, the word “aggadic” is meant to convey a certain hermeneutic and literary sensibility, “a disposition, a habit, a way of being in the world of words” (Derek Attridge). Alternatively, it approximates what Walter Benjamin had in mind, when, in a letter to Gershom Scholem from 1938, he spoke of Kafka’s affinity for transmissibility (“the haggadic element”), over and above unmediated truth.

• “Affinities” should be heard with Primo Levi’s caveat in mind. • As to the subtitle, if not immediately obvious, it is a play on words for “Torah

u’madda,” and is meant to convey our responsibility to modernity as one of several horizons against which our labor—and one hopes, also our gratification—in both “Yeshiva” and “University” take place. The practice of reading calls to us from both venues. The framing of that practice in one of them is our mandate in this course.

What this course IS:

• An opportunity to think through a certain dialogic potential for the twin components of Yeshiva College’s educational philosophy—each term making a claim on its counterpart, the two of them in proximity representing what the Austrian novelist Robert Musil (1880-1942) called “the third possibility.”

• Beyond analytic reflecting, a doing. The Netziv (19th commentator) interprets the word

la’asot in relation to performing the commandments as “to create the meaning of their words.” Likewise, va-asitem otam, an oft-repeated formula in the Torah, has been exegetically revised by a much earlier commentator, “va-asitem atem”—that is to say, “in the doing, you will make or refashion yourselves.”

• Its writing assignments follow the guidelines for all freshman honors courses. In

addition, we will avail ourselves of the electronic discussion board on Angel, YU’s

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online course management system. Finally but perhaps most important, THE COURSE WILL BE CHALLENGING IN THE BEST SENSE, BOTH DOABLE (WITH YOUR AGENCY) AND PLEASURABLE (WITH YOUR HELP).

Course materials

1) Coursepack (abbreviated CP) 2) Marilynne Robinson, Gilead 3) Bruno Schulz, The Street of Crocodiles

All are available through the YC Bookstore at www. http://yeshivabookstore.bkstore.com. Please bring the coursepack with you on the first day of class. Course requirements and grade percentages

• Mandatory attendance/Sedulous Participation 40% • Weekly postings to the discussion forum on Angel 5% • Five essays and Two revisions 45% • Take Home Final Exam 10%

Because each of the five shorter essays will demand a bit more than the previous one —and because I am confident that your writing skills will improve over the course of the semester—each essay will count more than the last (2, 3, 5, 6, and 9% respectively). THIS DOCUMENT: You are responsible for familiarizing yourself with the syllabus and the information it details. Make sure you have read it thoroughly, and return to from time to time during the semester. It represents your first act of close reading. ATTENDANCE POLICY: Your attendance is crucial to the success of our collective endeavor. You are expected to attend class regularly and punctually, and to prepare your work attentively. In other words, please be both present and present. Unless you face the most compelling of reasons, you should not miss a single class. If you accumulate more than two unexcused absences, your grade will drop in half-increments per additional absence (A becomes A-, A- becomes B+, etc. Attendance, informally speaking, during my office hours or by appointment is more than welcome. Please seek me out; that’s why I’m here. CLASSROOM ETIQUETTE: Another word for this is protocol, which comes from the Greek protocollon, meaning first glue, and referring to a leaf glued to a manuscript which described its contents (metaphor, please note, drawn from writing). Social glue enables us to proceed cooperatively by providing a “table” for the interactive “content” to follow.

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To that end:

• Please attend to each other. On principle, I will assume that you know less than you may think you know, as a matter of entitlement, and that you know more than you think you know as a matter of aptitude. It behooves you to maintain a delicate balance between modesty and self-empowerment.

• Be smart, be vocal, be invested; but be temperate and self-aware.

• Please come to class on time: your punctuality is as importance as your attendance. Similarly, I request that you not bring food or drink into the classroom, or go in and out of the classroom while we are in session unless physiologically compelled. Please confine all conversation with each other to the substantive or critical issue at hand.

• Remember that speech is no less theorizable or answerable to conventions than writing. Try to express yourself both thoughtfully and elegantly. Consider your speaking role as dialogic: addressing others, but also prompting, catalyzing, opening a space for their interventions. Aside from a craft and art of its own, speech is collective and communal: “every word” (says a theorist you will study) “is half someone else’s.” Differently put, even our words have ל“ ה“ י (la’shem ha’aretz u’mloah) inscribed upon them, i.e., use this speech with the owner’s blessing.

TECHNOLOGY. Laptops are permitted, but please, NO INDISCRIMINATE SURFING. Mobile phones should be demobilized, and all other electronic devices pocketed.

THE SCENE OF TEACHING, OF READING, AND OF WRITING. “Pedagogy is a relation, a network of obligations ….To be spoken to is to be placed under an obligation, an initial respect. Nor is this ‘respect’ a matter of deference; it is the simple fact of alertness to otherness.” (Bill Readings, The University in Ruins). I endorse these principles wholeheartedly, and encourage you to do the same. The scene of teaching is the scene of colloquy, of exchange, of shakla v’tarya. No less so is the reading you practice: every sustained act of written expression necessarily elicits, provokes, calls upon a response. This is the parallel meaning of “obligation” and “respect”: the text cannot be left to itself; moreover, it obligates questions over and above answers. Thus, for each class-session, the standing assignment is: do exactly that in the form of a short (1- or 2-paragraph) comment or question for every week’s pair of class-sessions, posted in advance to the Discussion Forum on Angel. This forum will serve as both an opportunity to think through aloud what you are reading (and thus, a kind of journal), and also a preliminary script, a dry-run, for classroom discussion. You may post for either Monday’s or Wednesday’s class, but please do so before 9am of that day’s class, and review all postings before you attend (you should photocopy your own posting as well as any others that strike you). On the Course Tab page, click on Lessons, click on the Weekly Discussion Forums Folder, and click on the relevant weekly forum. The Angel site can be accessed from this link:

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https://yu.elearning.yu.edu/section/default.asp?id=200909%5F12875. NB: The comment is heuristic not evaluative, just as the forum is designed for analysis not opinion. Please avoid comments about texts and/or their authors like the following: “I couldn’t make any sense of X.” “I totally disagree with Y.” “Z leaves me cold.”

THE SCENE OF GRADING. You will be assigned Letter Grades in this class. While that metric is not quantifiably exact, I grade holistically and with rare exceptions, unerringly. A probative instructor will sweat bullets over grades, even if s/he knows that they neither stand nor stand in for the expression and effort they assess. At any rate, they are assigned deliberatively, with care and expertise. But they are not negotiable (see under: “not a shuk”). I will, however, always make myself available to discuss the content and execution of your assignments. Please contact me to arrange a specific appointment. Grade inflation notwithstanding, an "A" will always signify something truly distinctive and first-rate. Institutional mythology notwithstanding, there is not such thing, therefore, as an “easy A.” I may “assign” such a grade, but more properly formulated, it is something earned, and striven for, by you. CITIZENSHIP. Keeping up with the reading, executing assignments on time, completing the work: this is the bare minimum. Active, enthusiastic, muscular participation, as one of my colleagues so eloquently puts it, also requires a willingness to trust in the merit of our efforts. Your ownership of this course follows from your investment in its possibilities, in the critical and imaginative gains it will yield. In a word, citizenship becomes a matter of faith. Citizenship means feeling yourself part of a polis, a collective enterprise, and while certain protocols are in effect for your civility, I also want to create a space for you to exercise your civic freedom and become co-participants. COMMUNICATION AND ACCESSIBILITY. My office hours are Thursdays, 3PM to 5PM. This is time reserved for you. Please feel free to meet and talk with me about anything related to the course: its material, any concerns you may have, its meaningfulness and utility. I can also be reached by phone and email. I will always respond to your emails, though not necessarily within twenty-four hours. As a general rule of thumb, an exchange over email is a precursor to fuller and more transparent face-to-face communication. Please keep in mind, though, it is a very tricky medium to get right in the absence of social cues we otherwise count on and has come to be deployed as a short cut to self-expression. A surviving member of the Donner Party after her rescue in 1847 wrote, “Never take no cutoffs.” Take her advice to heart. ACADEMIC INTEGRITY. Plagiarism and cheating are violations of YU’s policy on academic integrity. By registering in this course, you are promising to abide by all the requirements stated in this policy. Students in breach of this policy are liable to penalty, including disciplinary action beyond automatic course failure. Ignorance of what plagiarism involves will not be accepted as an excuse. It is your responsibility to recognize the

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difference between statements that do require documentation and those that do not. If you have any questions about documenting outside research and secondary resources and/or you are unsure of when to document secondary resources, please read the following link: http://www.yu.edu/catalog/undergrad/catalog9899/yeshiva.htm. The less obvious forms of plagiarism include

• Recycling your own work: “Submitting your own work as all or part of an assignment for two different courses [without] the permission of both professors” (xvii).

• Too much help from others: “…getting help from a fellow student, a friend, a relative, or some other person…. [who] exercise[s] skills on your behalf” (xx).

• Patchwriting: Creating “a pastiche of [one or more authors’] phrases and ideas so that your documentation is unacceptable even if you include a footnote or parenthetical reference” (xxiii).

The only acceptable writing help on papers is from the Writing Center. PLEASURE OF THE TEXT. One of my own former literature instructors wrote, “Beauty often comes to us through no work of our own, then leaves us prepared to undergo a giant labor.” The degree to which you exert yourself as readers is also the degree to which you receive—and give back—pleasure. Without of course presuming to legislate, I solicit you to want to express yourself and care about the words you choose and the sentences you shape. Literary interpretation is an essential part of literary experience. MY PLEASURE OF YOUR TEXT; OR, WRITING. In addition to your weekly postings on Angel, you will write five essays and two essay revisions. Each paper is due on the date scheduled, at the start of the class-period. No extensions will be given and no late papers will be accepted. All papers should conform to standard parameters for presentation: typewritten, double-spaced, font no larger than 14pt. All papers must be accompanied by a completed writer’s self-evaulation, including whatever outline and notes used in writing the essay. More explicit guidelines will be forthcoming. WRITING CENTER. The Wilf Campus Writing Center, in Furst 202, offers individualized tutoring that can support your writing for this course. All writers need feedback, even strong ones. Make an appointment and find out about drop-in hours at http://www.yu.edu/writingcenter. ENGLISH DEPARTMENT WEBSITE. It’s new, improved, and well worth your while to consult. http://www.yu.edu/~yeshivacollege/departments/english/

GOALS AND GUIDELINES OF H1.

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• Critical thinking • Intensive writing (essay or revision every 7-10 days) emphasizing ability to argue and

to persuade, drawing on models and on evidence shaped by reasoning. • Writing: 5 short essays (4-6 pages) including one revision; a medium-sized (7-10 pages)

analytic/persuasive essay, at least a substantial part of which should be revised. SPECIFIC GOALS FOR EXPOSITORY WRITING.

• Recognize and generate interesting ideas; • Think and read analytically and critically and use these skills effectively in your

writing; • Refine your arguments and use supporting evidence; • Write with authority and with a purpose; • Consciously employ an appropriate voice and tone; • Write to a specific audience; • Respond effectively in writing to views that differ from your own; • Recognize and produce standard written English; • Recognize and produce clear and effective sentences, transitions, and paragraphs; • Recognize and produce clear and effective organization and structures; • Identify and use conventions of different kinds of expository writing; • Draft and revise work making use of self-evaluation as well as comments by the

instructor and, when appropriate, by peers; • Edit and proofread final drafts.

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Schedule of readings

I READING—Scene 1 ____________________________________________________________________ Weds. Aug 26th Course Introduction:

In CP, pp 22-35 R o bert P in sk y, “L ibrary S c en e” R o bert F ro st, “E d u c atio n B y P o etry”

M ik h ail B ak h tin , T h e D ialo g ic Im ag in atio n (ex c erpt)

I I DUALISMS ____________________________________________________________________

Mon. Aug 31st In CP, pp 36-87 H aim N . B ialik , “Jew ish D u alism , “H alach ah an d A ggad ah ” S im o n R aw id o w icz, “Jeru salem an d B abylo n ” L io nel T r illing , “W o rd sw o rth and th e R abbis”

I I READING—Scene 2 ____________________________________________________________________

Weds. Sept 2nd In CP, pp 88-103 Alberto M an g u el, “ A c ts o f R ead in g : T h e M issin g 1 st P age” T o m L u tz, “T h in k Y o u K n o w H o w to R ead , D o Y o u ?” Mon. Spt 7th Labor Day Weds. Sept 9th In CP, pp 104-139 D erek A ttrid ge, T h e S in g u larity o f L iteratu re (ex c erpt)

S tan ley C avell, T h e S en ses o f W ald en (ex c erpt)

Mon. Sept 14th * * E S S A Y 1 D U E * * (2 pag es) In CP, pp 140-159 M ich ael F ish ban e, “T h e N o tio n o f a S acred T ext”

R o bert S c h o les, “T h e T ext in T h e C lass I” III WRITING 1—Poetry (American modernism) ____________________________________________________________________

Weds. Sept 16th In CP, pp 160-163; 166-168

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R o bert F ro st, P o em s Mon Sept 21st Rosh Hashanah break

Weds. Sept 23rd In CP, pp 169-201 F ro st, P o em s

R . D r. A h aro n L ic h ten stein , “R ead in g a P o em by R . F ro st” M o d ern A m erican P o etry “O n “S to ppin g B y W o o d s o n a S n o w y E ven in g” Mon. Sept 28th– Yom Kippur/Sukkot break Mon. Oct. 12th `

IV WRITING 2—Short Fiction (Israeli/European modernism) _____________________________________________________________________________ Weds. Oct. 14th **E S S A Y 2 D U E ** (3 pag es)

In CP, pp 202-231 G eo ffrey H artm an, “Imagination” S . Y . A gn o n , “Knots Upon Knots”

“A Book That Was Lost” Mon. Oct 19th In CP, pp 222-228 A gn o n , “On One Stone” “The Sense of Smell” Weds. Oct 21st On Angel, Upload A gn o n , “The Take of The Scribe,” “A Whole Loaf”

Mon. Oct 26th In CP, pp 230-234 F ran z K afk a, “The Problem of our Laws” “In Our Synagogue” “Leopards in the Temple” “The Building of the Temple”

“Mount Sinai”

Weds. Oct 28th In CP, pp 234-235, 249-252 K afk a, “A Crossbreed” “The Cares of a Family Man”

“The Hunter Gracchus” Mon. Nov 2nd * * R E V IS IO N O F E S S A Y S 1 O R 2 D U E * * In CP, pp 252-270 K afk a, “A Report to an Academy” “Josephine the Singer,”

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Weds. Nov 4th In CP, pp 272-279 D avid G ro ssm an, “T h e A ge o f G eniu s” B ru n o S c h u lz, T h e S treet o f C ro co d iles . 25-70

Mon. Nov 9th S ch u lz, 72-110 Weds. Nov 11th S ch u lz, 111-end

V W RITING 3—The Novel (Contemporary American) _____________________________________________________________________________ Mon. Nov 16th * * E S S A Y 3 D U E * * (4 -5 pages) In CP, pp 280-295

Jam es W o o d , “A cts o f D evo tio n ” an d “T h e H o m eco m in g ” W o o d , “T h e T u n n el” / S o ph ia L ear, “T u n n el V is io n ”

Weds. Nov 18th R o bin so n , G ilead Mon. Nov 23rd R o bin so n , G ilead Weds. Nov. 25th R o bin so n , G ilead Mon. Nov 30th R o bin so n , G ilead

VI “TALMUDIC READINGS” (Vilna on the Seine) _____________________________________________________________________________ Weds. Dec 2nd In Cp, pp 296-308

A ryeh C o h en , “W h y T extu al R easo n in g?”

Mon. Dec 7th In CP, pp 310-332 E m m an u el L ev in as, “A s O ld as th e W o rld ”

A n n ette A ro n o w icz, “T h e L ittle M an W ith B u rn ed T h igh s” Weds. Dec 9th In CP, pp 334-380

E . L ev in as, “T h e T ran slatio n o f S c riptu re”

VIII W RITING 4—Poetry (Contemporary Israeli) _____________________________________________________________________________ Weds. Dec 16th In CP, 400-406 Y eh u d ah A m ich ai, po em s fro m O pen C lo sed O pen * * E S S A Y 4 D U E * * (5 pag es) Wrap-up, Evaluations

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Mon. Dec 28th * * * E S S A Y 5 D U E (6 P A G E S ) * * R E V IS IO N O F E S S A Y 3 O R 4 * *

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Course Reader Table of Contents

1. Course Description…………………………………………………….2 2. Biographies……………………………………………………………...6 3. Robert Pinsky, “Library Scene”…………………………………….21 4. Robert Frost, “Education By Poetry”………………………………23 5. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination (excerpt)……………..32 6. Haim N. Bialik, “Jewish Dualism, “Halacha and Aggadah”……..37 7. Simon Rawidowicz, “Jerusalem and Babylon”……………………70 8. Lionel Trilling, “Wordsworth and the Rabbis”…………………..78 9. Alberto Manguel, “Acts of Reading: The Missing First Page”…..91 10. Tom Lutz, “Think You Know How to Read, Do You?”………….99 11. Derek Attridge, The Singularity of Literature (excerpt)………..107 12. Stanley Cavell, The Senses of Walden (excerpt)…………………..126 13. Michael Fishbane, “The Notion of a Sacred Text”……………...144 14. Robert Scholes, “The Text in The Class I”………………………152 15. Robert Frost, Poems………………………………………………..165 16. R. Dr. Aharon Lichtenstein, “Reading a Poem by R. Frost”….181 17. Modern American Poetry http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/

“On “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening”………………187 18. Geoffrey Hartman, “Imagination”……………………………….208 19. S. Y. Agnon, selected stories………………………………………222 20. Franz Kafka, selected stories………………………………………237 21. David Grossman, “The Age of Genius”………………………….279 22. James Wood, “Acts of Devotion” and “The Homecoming”…..292 23. James Wood, “The Tunnel” /Sophia Lear, “Tunnel Vision”…296 24. Aryeh Cohen, “Why Textual Reasoning?”………………………305 25. Emmanuel Levinas, “As Old as the World”…………………….319 26. Annette Aronowicz, “The Little Man With Burned Thighs”…331 27. Sandor Goodhart, “‘A Land That Devours Its Inhabitants’” ..342 28. E. Levinas, “The Pact”…………………………………………….366 29. E. Levinas, “The Translation of Scripture”……………………..376 30. Marc Alain Ouaknin, “The Two Nunim”…………………………390 31. Yehuda Amichai, two poems from Open Closed Open………….409

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Robert Pinsky (1940 - Present)

Robert Pinsky (born 1940) is an American poet and former Poet Laureate of the United States (1997-2000). He is known for his innovative, personal style, and his use of contemporary themes. Pinsky is a professor at Boston University where he teaches in the graduate creative writing program.

Pinsky was born in Long Branch, New Jersey. Pinsky attended Long Branch High School before earning his B.A. from Rutgers University and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Stanford University, where he held a Stegner Fellowship in creative writing. He taught at Wellesley College and the University of California, Berkeley before going to Boston University.

His collection of essays, Landor's Poetry was published in 1968 and was followed by other essay collections in 1977 with The Situation of Poetry and Poetry and the World (1988) which was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. He received a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship in 1974 and in 1975 published his collection of poems, Sadness and Happiness.

Other poetry collections followed: An Explanation of America (1980) which won the Saxifrage Prize; History of My Heart (1984), awarded the William Carlos Williams Award of the Poetry Society of America; The Want Bone (1990); and, The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems 1966-1996 which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, and was awarded the Ambassador Book Award in Poetry of the English Speaking Union and the Lenore Marshall Award. Professor Pinsky is renowned for his translation work, most notably The Inferno of Dante (1994) which won the Los Angeles Times Book Award in poetry, the Academy of American Poets' translation award, and was a Book-of-the-Month-Club Editor's Choice. He has received many other literary awards and honors. Robert Pinsky is also the author of the interactive fiction game Mindwheel (1984) developed by Synapse and released by Broderbund.

Robert Lee Frost (1874-1963)

Robert Lee Frost was born in San Francisco on March 26, 1874 to Isabelle Moodie, a Scottish schoolteacher, and William Prescott Frost, Jr., a journalist, local politician and ancestor of Devonshire Frost who had sailed to New Hampshire in 1634. Frost's family lived in California until his father had died when he was just eleven. He moved with his mother and sister to Lawrence, Massachusetts to live with his paternal grandfather.

In 1895, Frost married a former schoolmate, Elinor White; they had six children. Frost then became a teacher and continued publishing his poems in magazines to support his family. From 1897 to 1899, Frost attended Harvard, but failed to receive a degree. The couple moved to Derry, New Hampshire, where Frost worked as a cobbler, farmer and teacher at Pinkerton Academy and a state normal school in Plymouth. As the couple grew tired of farm life, they

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needed a change. Robert wanted to move to Vancouver and Elinor England, so England it was. In 1912 the couple sold their farm and moved to the Gloucestershire village of Dymock, where Robert became a full-time poet. The next year, A Boy's Will was published. The book received international fame and contains many of Frost's best-known poems: Mending Wall, The Death of the Hired Man, Home Burial, After Apple-Picking and The Wood-Pile. While in England, Frost made notable contacts with fellow poets as Ezra Pound (who gave Frost his first favorable review by an American), T.E. Hulme and Edward Thomas.

Frost returned to America in 1915 and bought a farm in Franconia, New Hampshire to farther his career in writing, teaching and lecturing. From 1916 to 1938, Frost worked as an English professor at Amherst College. He encouraged his students to bring the sound of man to their writings. Also in 1916, Frost was made a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters and published his third collection of verse, Moutain Interval. In 1920, Frost purchased a farm in South Shaftsbur, Vermont. Robert's wife died in 1938, followed by four of his children. He suffered from long boughts of depression and continual self-doubt. After the death of his wife, he employed Kay Morrison, who he became strongly attracted to. One of his finest love poems, A Witness Tree, was composed for her.

During the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy, Frost recited one of his poems, The Gift Outright. Robert also represented the United States on several other official missions. He became known for his poems that interplay voices, such as The Death of the Hired Man, and received numerous literary and academic honors.

Mikhail M. Bakhtin (1895-1975)

M. M. Bakhtin was a Russian literary theorist and philosopher of language. While developing his original theoretical approach in the 1920s and 1930s with collaborators including the Marxist scholars V. Voloshinov and P. Medvedev, he experienced unemployment and internal exile during Stalin's purges. Apart from Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics (1929), he could publish little until the post-Stalin cultural thaw of the 1960s, when his book Rabelais and his World (1965) appeared, followed in the 1970s by a number of his earlier essays; some of these were translated as The Dialogic Imagination (1981). In Western academic criticism since the late 1970s Bakhtin's influence has been widespread, partly because of his attractive notion of the carnivalesque in his study of Rabelais, but more for his concept of ‘dialogism’, in which language (and truth) are viewed as an open field of interactive utterances, and literature—especially the novel—is valued for keeping in play a variety of voices and languages. His wide-ranging ideas significantly influenced Western thinking in cultural history, linguistics, literary theory, and aesthetics.

Hayyim Nahman Bialik (1873-1934)

Hayyim Nahman Bialik was born in Radi, Volhynia in Russia to a traditional Jewish family. Bialik studied at a yeshiva in Zhitomir. At the age of 17, he was sent to the great Talmudic academy in Volozhin, Lithuania where he was attracted to the Enlightenment movement and

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joined the Hovevei Zion group. Bialik gradually drifted away from yeshiva life. His poem, HaMatmid ("The Talmud student") written in 1898, reflects his great ambivalence toward that way of life.

At 18, Bialik left for Odessa, where he became active in Jewish literary circles and first met Ahad Ha'am, who had a great influence on his Zionist outlook. It was at this time that his first poem was published, El Ha-Tzipor ("To the Bird"), which reflected his feelings toward Zion and Russia, themes that he was to return to frequently during this period.

Bialik was not yet a full-time writer and poet. For some time a bookkeeper in his father-in-law's business, he later taught, published and translated, and for six years was literary editor of the weekly Hashiloah in Odessa. He had hopes of becoming successful in business, but after a four-year period in the lumber trade he decided to make his living by teaching. In 1901 his first collection of poetry appeared and was greeted with much acclaim. Over the next three years he wrote a considerable number of works. Commentators say that this was his golden period. Although his later writings became more universal in outlook, his "In the City of Slaughter," written in response to the Kishinev pogrom was a powerful statement of anguish at the situation of the Jews.

He moved to Berlin in 1921, where he founded the Dvir publishing house. He moved the company to Tel Aviv in 1924 and devoted himself to cultural activities and public affairs. Bialik was immediately recognized as a celebrated literary figure. In 1927 he became head of the Hebrew Writers Union which had been established six years previously. He retained this position until his death in 1934. Bialik's poetry and prose have been widely translated. His poems are still read in contemporary Israel and several have been put to music by some of the country's most gifted composers. During his lifetime, he was called the "national poet," a title that has remained to this day.

Simon Rawidowicz (1896-1957)

Simon Rawidowicz was a scholar, an editor, a champion of the Hebrew language, whose life path led him, like so many others of his generation, from a small town in Poland to the centers of Jewish life in the West—first to one of the urban centers of Poland, and from there to Germany, to England, and finally to the United States. In all these different places, he was deeply and passionately involved in activities involving Jewish and Hebrew culture—teaching, scholarly research, writing, editing, and the organization and administration of various publishing and periodical projects.

He belonged to that generation of Eastern European Jews who were steeped in the Jewish and Hebrew intellectual tradition, who experienced the transition from the traditional way of life of the shteitl to the open, cosmopolitan environment in which Jewry reestablished itself in the Western world, and who contributed there to the creation of a new Jewish synthesis—and who were so deeply and organically steeped in the Jewish tradition that it hardly seemed relevant to ask if they were “secularist” or “religionist.” Tanakh, Talmud, Midrash, the Siddur, the great medieval Jewish philosophers and mystics, were all part of his daily bread. Rawidowicz was born in the Lithuanian town of Grayevo. His father, Hayyim Yitzhak, was a pious Jew, a

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Zionist, and a lover of the Hebrew language, who imbued him with the basic belief in the compatibility of world and Jewish culture, and taught him in both the traditional and the new way. His life path took him from Grayevo to Bialystok (1914-19); and from there to Berlin (1921-33); London (1933-39); Devonshire and Leeds (1941-48); Chicago (1948-50); and finally to Boston (1950-57). Although for years he dreamed of moving to Palestine, he was unable to find suitable work, and only sojourned here briefly in 1933.

During the course of his life he taught at Jews College and the school of African and Oriental Studies in London, at the University of Leeds, at the University of Chicago and at Brandeis; he was involved in the creation of two Hebrew publishing companies, Ayanot in Berlin and Ararat in Leeds; he served on the editorial board of three Hebrew journals, Ha-Tekufah (Bialystock), Ha-Olam (Berlin) and Metzudah (Leeds). He was a champion of the Hebrew language in the “Language War” during the early years of the revival of the Hebrew language, was among the central figures in Hovevei Sefat Ever, in Berit Ivrit Olamit, and in establishing the Keren Tarbut of the World Zionist Organization. At Brandeis he was instrumental in the creation and shaping of the Near Eastern and Judaic Studies Department, which was destined to become one of the major programs of its type in the Western hemisphere. His scholarly interests spanned the gamut of medieval and early modern Jewish thought—Maimonides, Judah Halevi, Saadya Gaon, Spinoza, Moses Mendelssohn, and Nahman Krochmal. He died relatively young, barely past his sixtieth birthday, leaving many of his plans and projects unrealized. He is survived by his only one son, Benjamin, today a professor of Jewish history at Brandeis.

Lionel Trilling (1905-1975)

Among American critics of the twentieth century, Lionel Trilling was especially illuminating, subtle, and wise. His consummate intelligence, which found its most congenial expression in the poise and discernment of his essays, earned an admiration that is likely to endure even if the influence of his particular judgments and opinions were to fade. He was also a minor novelist and writer of short stories.

Born in New York City and educated in the public schools there, Trilling was the son of Orthodox Jewish immigrant parents. His father, David Trilling, was a tailor and a furrier; and his mother, Fannie Cohen Trilling, had been born in England, a country whose culture was to exert a lifelong fascination for Trilling himself. Middle-class in its ideals and aspirations, his family spoke English at home and felt at ease in Gentile society, according to Diana Rubin Trilling, whom he married in 1929. (They were to have one son, James, born in 1948.) Trilling placed no special emphasis on his Jewish origins, though he later acknowledged his ethnic background as "one of the shaping conditions of my temperament" and would have regarded any effort to disguise his Jewish identity as dishonorable. He taught at Columbia University from 1931 until his death. His collections of literary essays include The Liberal Imagination (1950), Beyond Culture (1965), Sincerity and Authenticity (1972), and Mind in the Modern World (1972).

Alberto Manguel (1948-present)

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Alberto Manguel is a Canadian Argentine-born writer, translator, and editor. He is the author of numerous non-fiction books such as The Dictionary of Imaginary Places (co-written with Gianni Guadalupi in 1980) and A History of Reading (1996) The Library at Night (2007) and Homer's Iliad and Odyssey: A Biography (2008), and novels such as News From a Foreign Country Came (1991). Manguel has also written film criticism such as Bride of Frankenstein (1997) and collections of essays such as Into the Looking Glass Wood (1998). Manguel grew up in Israel, where his father was the Argentinian ambassador. Later, in Buenos Aires, when Manguel was still a teenager, he met the writer Jorge Luis Borges, a customer of the Pygmalion Anglo-German bookshop in Buenos Aires where Manguel worked after school. As Borges was almost blind, he would ask others to read out loud for him, and Manguel was fortunate enough to become one of Borges' readers, several times a week from 1964 to 1968.

Derek Attridge ( -present)

Derek Attridge came to York from Rutgers University in the USA in 1998 as Leverhulme Research Professor, and in 2003 became Professor of English. His interests centre on the language of literature, but radiate in many different directions. He has published a number of articles and books on aspects of literary theory, many of them reflecting his long association with the philosopher Jacques Derrida, a selection of whose work he has edited. His most recent theoretical study, The Singularity of Literature, raises the question of the distinctiveness of literature as a linguistic and social practice, and argues that a crucial element is the response to otherness that characterizes both the writing of an inventive literary work and the reading of it as literature. This book is also informed by recent developments in ethics arising from the writings of Emmanuel Levinas. In September 2006 he won an ESSE Book Award for this work.

Professor Attridge was born in South Africa, where he first attended university, and some of his recent work is concerned with South African literature, including an anthology of critical essays co-edited with Rosemary Jolly and a study of the novels of J. M. Coetzee (a study which also reflects his interest in questions of ethics and responsibility as they apply to literature). He is also well-known as a Joyce scholar: his publications on Joyce include two books (Joyce Effects and How to Read Joyce), half of another book (Peculiar Language), and four edited or co-edited volumes on Joyce.

A final interest is poetic form, and he has published several books on questions of rhythm in poetry. One current project is a history of poetry in performance, starting with the oral performances of Ancient Greece. Other current projects include the co-editorship of two books with colleagues in the Department, The Cambridge History of South African Literature (with David Attwell) and Theory after "Theory" (with Jane Elliott), and books on poetic language and literary theory.

Stanley Cavell (1926-present)

Stanley Cavell is Walter M. Cabot Professor Emeritus of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard University. Born to a Jewish family in Atlanta, Georgia, Cavell first trained in music, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in music at Berkeley in 1947. Shortly after being accepted at Juilliard, he gave up studying music and changed to philosophy at UCLA and later

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at Harvard, where he studied under J. L. Austin. His first teaching position was at Berkeley, but he returned to Harvard, where he became the Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value in 1963. In 1997 he became Professor Emeritus. Currently, Cavell resides in Brookline, Massachusetts.

Although trained in the Anglo-American analytic tradition, Cavell often engages in dialogue with the continental tradition. He is well known for his inclusion of film and literary study into philosophical inquiry. Cavell has written extensively on Ludwig Wittgenstein, J. L. Austin, and Martin Heidegger, as well as on the American Transcendentalists Henry Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. He has been associated with an approach toward interpreting Wittgenstein sometimes known as the New Wittgenstein. Much of Cavell's writing incorporates autobiographical elements concerning how his movement between and within the ideas of these thinkers influenced and influences his own thinking. Principal works: Must We Mean What We Say? (1969); The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (1971); The Senses of Walden (1972); The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (1979); Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (1981); Disowning Knowledge: In Six Plays of Shakespeare (1987); In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Scepticism and Romanticism (1988); A Pitch of Philosophy: Autobiographical Exercises (1994); Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life (2004).

Michael Fishbane (1943-present)

Michael Fishbane is Nathan Cummings Professor of Jewish Studies in the Divinity School; also in the Committee on Jewish Studies and the College. Fishbane was trained in Semitic languages, biblical studies, and Judaica. His writings span from the ancient Near East and biblical studies to rabbinics, the history of Jewish interpretation, Jewish mysticism, and modern Jewish thought. Among his many books are Text and Texture; Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel; Garments of Torah; The Kiss of God; and The Exegetical Imagination: On Jewish Thought and Theology. Both Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel and The Kiss of God won the National Jewish Book Award in scholarship. His commentary on the prophetic lectionary (Haftarot) in Judaism was published in 2002 (Jewish Publication Society Bible Commentary), and his book Biblical Myth and Rabbinic Mythmaking was published in 2003 (Oxford University Press). He is now completing a multileveled comprehensive commentary presenting the full range of Jewish interpretations on the Song of Songs. His latest work, Sacred Attunement: A Jewish Theology, was published in fall 2008 by the University of Chicago Press. In progress are a study of Jewish liturgical poetry and a treatment of spiritual exercises in Jewish religious history. Prof. Fishbane received a Guggenheim Fellowship, among other major grants, and has twice been a fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies at the Hebrew University. Prof. Fishbane is a member of the American Academy of Jewish Research, and has been recently awarded a Lifetime Achievement in Textual Studies by the National Foundation of Jewish Culture. His life and work was written up in the forthcoming new edition of the Encyclopedia Judaica.

Robert Scholes (1929-present)

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Robert Scholes is Research Professor of Modern Culture and Media, Professor Emeritus of English, Comparative Literature, Modern Culture and Media. He received his B.A. from Yale University in 1950. He served in the Navy reserve from 1951 to 1955. He received his M.A. in 1956 and his Ph.D. in 1959, both from Cornell. He has taught at the University of Virginia, Utah, until receiving an appointment as a professor of English and comparative literature at Brown University in 1970. He has edited several anthologies, and has a specialty in Joyce studies. Books include The Fabulators (Oxford, 1967); • Structuralism in Literature (Yale, 1974); Semiotics and Interpretation (Yale, 1982); Textual Power (Yale, 1985); Protocols of Reading (Yale, 1989); In Search of James Joyce (Illinois, 1992): The Rise and Fall of English (Yale, 1998); The Crafty Reader (Yale, 2001).

R. Dr. Aharon Lichtenstein (1933-present)

Born in France in 1933, Rav Aharon Lichtenstein currently serves as the co-Rosh Yeshiva of Yeshivat Har Etzion in Alon Shvut, Israel. Rabbi Lichtenstein grew up in the United States, studied in Yeshiva Rabbi Chaim Berlin under Rabbi Yitzchok Hutner. He earned a BA and semicha ("rabbinic ordination") at Yeshiva University and a PhD in English Literature at Harvard University, where he studied under Douglas Bush. After serving as Rosh yeshiva at Yeshiva University for several years, Rabbi Lichtenstein answered Rabbi Yehuda Amital's request in 1971 to join him at the helm of Yeshivat Har Etzion, located in Gush Etzion, Israel, and moved to Jerusalem. He still maintains a close connection to Yeshiva University as a Rosh Kollel for the Gruss Institute in Jerusalem, an affiliate of Yeshiva University and its rabbinical school, Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary. In 2005, he and his wife Tovah moved to Alon Shvut, where Yeshivat Har Etzion is located. On January 4, 2006, Rabbi Yaaqov Medan and Rabbi Baruch Gigi were officially invested as co-roshei yeshiva alongside Rav Amital and Rav Lichtenstein, with an eye toward Rabbi Amital's intention to retire.[1] On October 28, 2008, Rav Lichtenstein's eldest son, Rabbi Mosheh Lichtenstein, was officially invested as co-Rosh Yeshiva, simultaneous with Rav Amital's official retirement, this time with an eye toward Rav Aharon Lichtenstein's eventual plan to retire.

He is committed to intensive and original Torah study and articulates a bold Jewish worldview that embraces elements of modernity within the framework of a Torah life, reflecting the tradition of his teacher and father-in-law, Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik in line with Centrist Orthodoxy.

Geoffrey H. Hartman (1929-present)

Geoffrey Hartman is a German born American literary theorist, sometimes identified with the Yale School of deconstruction, but also has written on a wide range of subjects, and cannot be categorized by a single school or method. Hartman was born in Germany, in an Ashkenazi Jewish family. He came to the United States in 1946, and later became an American citizen. He is now "Sterling Professor emeritus of English and Comparative Literature" at Yale University. One of his long term interests is the English poet, William Wordsworth. His work explores the distinction between literature and literary commentator. He helped found the Yale

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Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, and lectures on issues dealing with the production and implications of testimony. Books include The Unmediated Vision: An Interpretation of Wordsworth, Hopkins, Rilke, and Valéry (1954); Wordsworth's Poetry, 1787-1814 (1964); The Fate of Reading and Other Essays (1975); Criticism in the Wilderness: The Study of Literature Today (1980); Saving the Text: Literature/Derrida/Philosophy (1981); The Longest Shadow: In the Aftermath of the Holocaust (1996); Scars of the Spirit : The Struggle Against Inauthenticity (2004); A Scholar’s Tale (2009).

Shmuel Yosef Agnon (1888-1970)

S. Y. Agnon was born in Buczacz, Eastern Galicia. Raised in a mixed cultural atmosphere, in which Yiddish was the language of the home, and Hebrew the language of the Bible and the Talmud which he studied formally until the age of nine, Agnon also acquired a knowledge of German literature from his mother, and of the teachings of Maimonides and of the Hassidim from his father. In 1907 he left home and made his way to Palestine, where, except for an extended stay in Germany from 1913 to 1924, he has remained to this day. At an early age, Agnon began writing the stories which form a chronicle of the decline of Jewry in Galicia. Included among these is his first major publication, Hakhnasat Kalah (The Bridal Canopy), 1922, which re-creates the golden age of Hassidism, and his apocalyptic novel, Oreach Nata Lalun (A Guest for the Night), 1939, which vividly depicts the ruin of Galicia after the First World War. Nearly all of his other writings are set in his adopted Palestine and deal with the replacement of the early Jewish settlement of that country by the more organized Zionist movement after the Second World War. The early pioneer immigrants are portrayed in his epic Temol Shilshom (Only Yesterday), 1945, considered his greatest work, and also in the nightmarish stories of Sefer Hamaasim, 1932. While these and other works such as Pat Shlema, 1933, and Shevuat Emunim (Two Tales), 1943, are enough to assure his stature as the greatest living Hebrew writer, Agnon has also occupied himself with commentaries on the Jewish High Festival, Yamin Noraim, 1938, on the giving of the Torah, Atem Reitem, 1959, and on the gathering of Hassidic lore, Sifreihem Shel Tzadiki, 1960-1961.

Franz Kafka (1883-1924)

Kafka was born in Prague, Bohemia, now the Czech Republic, into a Jewish middle-class, German speaking family; his mother Julie, (née Löwy), three younger sisters and his successful merchant father Hermann. Hermann owned a shop below where the family lived in Prague's House of the Three Kings. He was ill-tempered and disrespectful towards his son's escape into literature and pursuit of writing and proved to be an on-going source of conflict and despair in many of Kafka's works. Kafka became the eldest and only son when his two brothers died in infancy and he was excruciatingly aware of this role in the family for the rest of his life.

In 1902 Kafka met Max Brod who would become his translator, supporter and most intimate friend. Kafka entered the German University in Prague in 1901 to study German literature and law, receiving his doctorate in 1906. Kafka was to lead a relatively inauspicious life, an exemplary employee with the Worker's Accident Insurance Institute in Prague from 1907 to

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1922. He would finally gain renown posthumously upon Max Brod's publication of his three major works, The Trial (1925) and The Castle in 1926 and Amerika (1927). Kafka's oeuvre is often filled with black humor in the style of parable, meditations, poetic fragments, and sketches. Though his works are often open to multiple interpretations, causing difficulty categorizing his work in any single genre, existentialism and modernism are among them.

In 1911, Kafka was to spend his first of many curative periods in sanatoriums and spas for ill health. In 1912 he met and became engaged to Felice Bauer from Berlin. In 1912 he finished Metamorphosis his best-known short story, a masterpiece of stunning psychological, sociological and existential angst. He wrote Meditation in 1913, a collection of short prose pieces. In 1914 he finished Before the Law.

In 1916 Kafka wrote The Judgement, directly reflecting his struggle with his father; the prophetic In the Penal Colony and A Country Doctor (1919), another collection of short prose. In 1917 Kafka broke his second engagement to Felice Bauer, most likely precipitated by his continued failure to cut ties with his domineering father and set forth in his own life to get married and settle down. He was also diagnosed with tuberculosis after years of poor health. In 1923, finally escaping his paternal family he went to Berlin to write exclusively. He wrote A Hunger Artist in 1924, four stories illustrating the concise and lucid style of Kafka's writing in his later years.

Kafka's lack of confidence and personal misgivings about his work caused him to request that all his unpublished manuscripts be destroyed, however his friend, biographer and literary executor Max Brod didn't obey his wishes and in 1925 he published The Trial, indisputably Kafka's most successful novel in it's dark exploration of anxiety, paranoia and persecution. Brod also published The Castle (1926) a wide-sweeping metaphor of authority and bureaucracy and the search for grace and forgiveness and Amerika (1927) with a light and amusing angle but also an examination of the symbolic horrors of modern life.

3 June 1924, Franz Kafka died from complications of tuberculosis in Kierling, near Vienna, Austria. His remains are buried alongside his parent's under a two-meter obelisk in Prague's New Jewish Cemetery in Olsanske. There is no epitaph, but Milena Jesenska, his lover and Czech journalist and writer, a few days after his death wrote: “He wrote the most significant works of modern German literature, which reflect the irony and prophetic vision of a man condemned to see the world with such blinding clarity that he found it unbearable and went to his death.”

Bruno Schulz (1892-1942)

Bruno Schulz was born in Drohobycz (now Drogobych, Ukraine), a small town in Galicia, into a Jewish family. The area was then part of the Austrian Empire. His father run a clothing shop, but left it to the care of his wife due to his poor health. Also a very important figure in the house was the sadistic maid. Schulz studied architecture at Lvov University and fine arts in Vienna, specializing in lithography and drawing. After returning to his native town, he worked from 1924 to 1939 as an art teacher in the local gymnasium. One of his students has later recalled that Schulz was considered strange; he was laughed at behind his back. Schulz always

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wore a flannel jacket and a scarf around his neck. After his friend Wladyslaw Riff died in 1927, Schulz stopped writing prose for years.

Schulz did not start his literary career until the 1930s. His reviews appeared in literary magazine Wiadomosci Literackie, he corresponded with such avant-gardists as Witold Gombrowicz (1904-1969) and Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz (1885-1939), but mostly Schulz lived far from the literary circles. In the mid-1930s he spent some time in Warsaw and visited also Paris. Although Schulz's correspondence with the Yiddish poet Deboah Vogel and other women was intense, he never married.

In 1938 Schulz was awarded the Golden Laurel of the Polish Academy of Literature. In 1939 Germany invaded Poland from the West and the remainder of the country was occupied by the Soviet Union. Between 1939 and 1941 S chulz lived in the Soviet-occupied territory, but when Germany attacked the U.S.S.R., Drohobycz was occupied by the Nazis. A Gestapo officer, Felix Landau, liked Schulz's drawings, arranged him a pass out of the ghetto, and commissioned him to paint frescoes in his house. Landau killed a Jewish dentist who was protected by another Gestapo officer, Karl Günther. In the "Aryan" quarter Schulz was spotted by him, and shot in retaliation, on the street in November 19, 1942. The manuscript of his novel, entitled Messiah, is said to exist in the KGB archives relating to the Gestapo.

Schulz wrote in Polish although he knew both Yiddish and German. As a writer Schulz made his debut with Sklepy Cynamonowe (1934), a collection of short stories, which was published at the urging of the novelist Zofia Nalkowska. The book was followed by Sanatorium pod Klepsydra (1937, The Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass). With these two collections Schulz became one of the most original figures of polish avant-garde. In 1938 he was awarded the Golden Laurel of the Polish Academy of Literature. After the war Schulz was "rediscovered" and a comprehensive collection of his stories, Proza, was published in 1964. It included also letters and literary reviews. Schulz's erotically suggestive paintings and drawings have been compared to those of Utrillo, de Chirico, Henri Rousseau, and Chagall. A selection of his drawings was published in Druga jesien (1973). Schulz's drawing and paintings were discovered in 2001 and shipped to Israel, to the Holocaust memorial.

Marilynne Robinson (1947-present)

Robinson was born and grew up in Sandpoint, Idaho, and did her undergraduate work at Pembroke College, the former women's college at Brown University, receiving her B.A. in 1966. She received her Ph.D. in English from the University of Washington in 1977. Her 1980 novel Housekeeping (see 1980 in literature) won a Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for best first novel and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Her second novel, Gilead (see 2004 in literature), was acclaimed by critics and received the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the 2004 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, and the 2005 Ambassador Book Award. Her third novel, Home, published in 2008, was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award, and won the 2009 Orange Prize for Fiction. Also in 2009, she held a Dwight H. Terry Lectureship at Yale University, giving a series of talks entitled Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self.

Robinson is also the author of Mother Country: Britain, the Welfare State, and Nuclear

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Pollution (1989) and The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought (1998). She has written articles and book reviews for Harper’s, The Paris Review, and The New York Times Book Review.

She has been writer-in-residence or visiting professor at numerous universities, including the University of Kent, Amherst, and the University of Massachusetts' MFA Program for Poets & Writers. She teaches at the Iowa Writers' Workshop and makes her home in Iowa City. Robinson took a sabbatical in fall 2007 to complete her third novel. Published in September 2008, Home is a companion piece to Gilead, focusing on the Boughton family during the same time period that Gilead covers.

Aryeh Cohen ( -present)

Aryeh Cohen is Associate Professor of Rabbinic Literature at American Jewish University. He is the author of Rereading Talmud: Gender, Law and the Poetics of Sugyot, and co-editor of Beginning/Again: Towards a Hermeneutics of Jewish Texts. He is also a member of the Sh’ma advisory board, and an editor of the on-line journal Textual Reasoning. Cohen grew up in the Orthodox world, made aliyah at the age of 17 and served in the Army in the Hesder program while at Yeshivat Har Etzion. He lived in Israel for twelve years. During this time he completed his B.A. at the Hebrew University and worked with Gesher promoting dialogue between religious and secular high school students.

While at the Hebrew University, he became a fellow at the Hartman Institute of Advanced Jewish Studies in Jerusalem. The aim of the Institute was to put Talmud into philosophical conversation. Within the goal of pursuing the analysis of Rabbinic textuality in a more rigorous way, he pursued graduate studies at Brandeis University, working in Talmud, literary theory, and philosophy. In 1995, he was hired as chair of the Jewish Studies department in the College of Arts and Sciences at American Jewish University and Assistant Professor of Rabbinic Literature in the college and at the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies. He is also a member of the Scriptural Reasoning group at Cambridge University in England.

Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995)

Emmanuel Levinas was born in Kaunas, Lithuania into a traditional Jewish family. He did his elementary and secondary studies in Jewish and secular subjects first in Lithuania and then, later, in Russia. At the age of 18 he went west to study at the University of Strasbourg, where he majored in philosophy both at the undergraduate and graduate levels. In 1928 he moved to the University of Freiburg to study with the great philosopher Edmund Husserl, the father of the so-called phenomenological school in modern philosophy. In Freiburg he also encountered, for the first time, Martin Heidegger and was deeply influenced by his classic 1927 work Sein und Zeit (Being and Time) (1962). In 1930 he received his doctorate for a thesis on the Théorie de l'intuition dans la phénoménologie de Husserl (The Theory of Intuition in Husserls' Phenomenology) (1973).

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He became a naturalized French citizen in 1930 and subsequently professor of philosophy and director of the Ecole Normale Orientale of the Alliance Israelite Universelle in Paris. In 1964 he assumed a professorship in philosophy at the University of Poitiers, and later, in 1967, at the University of Paris at Nanterre, moving finally to a professorial appointment at the Sorbonne in 1973. He retired in 1979, but continued writing books, some of which sold over 200,000 copies.

Levinas' work is best understood as an attempt to proceed philosophically beyond the views of Husserl and Heidegger, concerned as they were with phenomenology and ontology, respectively, and to engage in a more immediate and basic consideration of the nature and meaning of other persons. Such a focus reveals the Other - that is, the other person - as existing in his or her own right - that is, not subject without remainder to incorporation within the conceptual world of the subject-knower, nor, again, something whose essence can be captured by thought. Once the nature of this otherness is grasped, once the Other is appreciated as beyond the totality of ones' organization of the world as knowledge, as what Levinas called "non-synthesizable," the Other can be rightly understood as a window, an access, through which to intuit the Infinite.

In doing so he inverted the relationship between ontology and ethics and made ethics primary. Levinas referred to this ethically charged intersubjectivity as characterized by responsibility for the Other. The Other, by his or her nature, makes an ethical demand upon oneself, and the self in response can only be the fully human personality that it is by assuming the moral responsibility demanded of it. Even when the Other does not respond at all, or responds unethically, the self is bound by its own moral imperatives, emerging from its own compelling subjectivity, to act with moral correctness. It is this demand and the behavior predicated upon it that makes one human. And it is in just this ethical modality that we glimpse the Infinite within our finite existence. In ethical action we testify to the Infinite, and such testimony, in effect, brings into being a dialogue of man and Spirit, a dialogue in which the human testimony interiorizes and makes its own the previously exterior and distant "voice" of God. His work was influential even among Christians - Pope John Paul II often praised and quoted his writings.

This latter concern, this concentration upon man's establishing a partnership with the Ultimate, reflects Levinas' preoccupation with traditional religious and especially Jewish categories. An observant and learned Jew, Levinas saw his philosophical work as consistent with his religious heritage, though not necessarily in the medieval harmonistic sense. Thus, in addition to technical works on the cutting edge of contemporary philosophy, he also wrote numerous papers and monographs on Jewish themes, especially as they are found, analyzed, and classified in the Talmud (rabbinic sources). Levinas died of heart failure on December 25th, 1995, in Paris.

Annette Aronowicz ( -present)

Annette Aronowicz holds the Weis Chair in Judaic Studies and teaches Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College. She is the author of Freedom from Ideology: Secrecy in Modern Expression (1987) and Jews and Christians on Time and Eternity: Charles Péguy's Portrait of Bernard- Lazare (1998), and is the translator of Nine Talmudic Readings by

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Emmanuel Levinas (1991). Her current research focuses on East European communists in Paris after World War II.

Sandor Goodhart ( -present)

Sandor Goodhart received his Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1977 in English and comparative literature. He was one of the earliest graduate fellows of the School of Criticism and Theory at the University of California at Irvine (summer 1977). He is a specialist in dramatic literature (Greek tragedy and philosophy, Shakespeare, modern drama), literary theory and criticism (structuralism and poststructuralism, the history of critical theory), and Jewish Studies (Hebrew Bible, modern Jewish thought, Holocaust Studies). He is the author of Sacrificing Commentary: Reading The End of Literature (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996) and is at work on two books: Moebian Nights: Literary Reading After Auschwitz and The Tears of Esau: Reading, Revalation, And The Prophetic.

Marc-Alain Ouaknin (1957-present)

Marc-Alain Ouaknin was born in Paris. Both a rabbi and a philosopher, he is the son of Rabbi Jacques Ouaknin (b. 1932, Marrakesh, Morocco) and Eliane Erlich Ouaknin (b. 1932, Lille; d. 2007, Marseille.) His father is the Grand Rabbi of the French cities of Reims, Lille, Metz and Marseille. Ouaknin holds a doctorate in philosophy and is the Director of the Centre De Recherches Et D’études Juives in Paris. He is also a professor of comparative literature at Bar-Ilan University in Israel. A major focus of his work since the 80s has been to comment upon and extend the philosophy of Emmanuel Lévinas by comparing Levinas's writings to other Jewish texts—in particular to those of Hasidism and the Kabbalah. His work is in the continental philosophical tradition and emphasizes concepts current in French intellectual life. Unlike traditional rabbinic discourse, Ouaknin regularly cites thinkers outside the Jewish tradition, such as the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

Yehuda Amichai (1924-2000)

Israeli poet, who also published short stories, novels, and plays. Amichai was among the first to compose poems in colloquial Israeli Hebrew. Amichai's own life was closely linked to the birth and battle for existence of the State of Israel. In 1982 he received the Israel Prize of Poetry, his country's highest honor. Amichai was born in Würzburg, Germany, to a merchant family of Orthodox Jews. His ancestors had lived there in southern Germany since the Middle Ages. After the Nazis came to power, his family emigrated to Palestine in 1935, and settled finally in Jerusalem. Amichai studied Hebrew from early childhood and received a religious education. During World War II he served in the Jewish Brigade of the British Army. Later, during the War of Independence, he served as a commando with the Haganah underground. He was also in active duty in the army in 1956 and 1973.

Amichai studied at the Hebrew University, and then earned his living by teaching the Bible and Hebrew literature in secondary schools. Amichai had started to write poetry in 1949. His first collection, Achshav ubayamin na'acherim, was published in 1955. With his second collection,

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Bemerchak shetey tikvot (1958), Amichai established himself as one of the major poets of the 'Palmach generation', writers who emerged out of Israeli's war for independence. It included such names as Nathan Zach (b. 1930), Dalia Ravikovitch, T. Carmi, and Dan Pagis. Much of Amichai's fiction is autobiographical. His first novel, Not of This Time, Not of This Place (1963) was about a young German Jew living in Israel after World War II and trying to understand the world which had created the Holocaust. His second novel, Mi yitneni malon (1971), was about an Israeli poet living in New York. It was published while Amichai was a visiting poet at an American college. In 1971 and 1976 he was a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and Dorot Visiting Fellowship (1983-84), and a visiting poet at New York University (1987). In the background of Amichai's work is biblical Hebrew, in which he incorporates colloquial expressions and language of the modern day world. In the 1970s the English poet Ted Hughes made Amichai's work known to English and American readers. Amichai died in Jerusalem on September 22, 2000.