On the Margins of Modernism

Modernism valorizes the marginal, the exile, the "other"—yet we tend to use writing from the most commonly read European languages (English, French, German) as examples of this marginality. Chana Kronfeld counters these dominant models of marginality by looking instead at modernist poetry written in two decentered languages, Hebrew and Yiddish. What results is a bold new model of literary dynamics, one less tied to canonical norms, less limited geographically, and less in danger of universalizing the experience of minority writers.

Kronfeld examines the interpenetrations of modernist groupings through examples of Hebrew and Yiddish poetry in Europe, the U.S., and Israel. Her discussions of Amichai, Fogel, Raab, Halpern, Markish, Hofshteyn, and Sutskever will be welcomed by students of modernism in general and Hebrew and Yiddish literatures in particular.

Chana Kronfeld is Associate Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the coeditor of David Fogel: The Emergence of Hebrew Modernism (1993).

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INTRODUCTION: MINOR MODERNISMS:BEYOND DELEUZE AND GUATTARI
PART ONE: MODELING MODERNISM
1
Modernism through the Margins: From Definitions to Prototypes
2
Theory /History: Between Period and Genre; Or, What to Do with a Literary Trend?
3
Behind the Graph and the Map:Literary Historiography and the Hebrew Margins of Modernism
PART TWO: STYLISTIC PROTOTYPES
4
Beyond Language Pangs: The Possibility of Modernist Hebrew Poetry
5
Theories of Allusion and Imagist Intertextuality:When Iconoclasts Evoke the Bible 
PART THREE: PARAGONS FROM THE PERIPHERY
6
Yehuda Amichai: On the Boundaries of Affiliation 
7
David Fogel and Moyshe Leyb Halpern: Liminal Moments in Hebrew and Yiddish Literary History 
8
The Yiddish Poem Itself: Readings in Halpern, Markish, Hofshteyn, and Sutzkever
CONCLUSION: MARGINAL PROTOTYPES,PROTOTYPICAL MARGINS
NOTES
WORKS CITED
INDEX