On the basis of Dostoevsky and Agnon, this book analyzes the problem of literary mythopoesis. Guided by a personalistic-dialogical conception of myth, the author elaborates a theory of literary mythopoesis and develops a method of studying mythopoetic processes on different levels of meaning in a work of literature. As a result, mythopoesis is revealed as one of the fundamental mechanisms of producing a complex of structures, while mythopoetic criticism functions as a dialogue between different cultures thus documenting the relationship between ethics and aesthetics in literature.

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,...

Starting with a discussion on the elements of the genre of alternative (counterfactual) history and on its place between the poles of historical determinism and relativism, this book develops a literary theory of the historical alternativeness principle and applies it to the reading of The City with All That is Therein (Ir u-mloa)-one of the most important and less-studied books of the greatest Israeli writer, Nobel Prize winner S.Y. Agnon (1887-1970). The investigation reveals that this principle is by no means inherent solely in modernism and postmodernism, but lies at the very basis of the...