At the Other End of Gesture: Anthropological Poetics of Gesture in Modern Hebrew Literature

ISBN-13: 9783631566893 / Angielski / Miękka / 2007 / 198 str.

Roman Katsman;Michael Guggenheimer

Opis

This book discusses the enchantment and power of gesture in literature and art, using a wide selection of cultural and scientific materials, from the Bible, Quintillian and Buddhism to David McNeil s cognitive psychology, Eric Gans philosophical anthropology and Richard Sennett s sociology. The author demonstrates that represented gestures, and even those that are not represented, originate a unique cognitive-physical interaction between the reader or viewer and the composition. The discussion focuses mainly on an analysis of gestural poetics in a number of works of modern Hebrew writers, from the beginning of the twentieth to the beginning of the twenty-first century, from Uri Nissan Gnessin and Jacob Steinberg to Meir Shalev and Etgar Keret. In the course of the discussion gesture is shown to be a micro-myth that unites order and chaos, a mechanism that establishes the power of symbolism and visibility in the modern culture of the -fall of public man-. The study demonstrates the variety of ways in which a myth of impossible and inevitable touch-non-touch gestures is created."

Spis treści

Contents: Gestures in culture - Non-touch gesture as an anthropological motive of art - Gesture between negation and constitution of personality - The formula of literary gesture: touch-non-touch - Gestology of symbolism: on the gestural origin of symbols - The nature of gesture: Liminality, Negativity, and Chaos - Poetics of visibility and gesture - Ritual, symbol, and memory constitution by gesture - Urban gesture - Public and private spaces, ethics and the possibility of gesture - Gesture and discourse.

O autorze

The Author: Roman Katsman is a Senior Lecturer of Modern Hebrew literature, theory and poetics at the Department of Literature of the Jewish People, Bar-Ilan University (Israel). The author has published on Mythopoesis in Dostoevsky and Agnon and in Modern and Postmodern Hebrew and Slavic Literature.