The Department of the Hebrew Literature
Subject: The reception of the Greco-Roman classics in modern Hebrew literature.
Advisor: Prof. Giddon Ticotsky.
Abstract: My research deals with the encounter between the classical literature of Greece and Rome and the Modern Hebrew literature. I will argue that a character born in the classics and developed over years in Western literature - Odysseus, Orpheus, Hercules, Medea, Narcissus etc. - may bring with it to Hebrew literature a whole world of symbols and foreign-familiar cultural associations. In other words, the study examines how Hebrew writers and poets turn to classical literature, whether in translation or in a work inspired by the classics, allows them to expand the Hebrew range through ideas and models that are not found in the Jewish bookshelf.
I intend to examine the places where Hebrew literature imported into it particular characters from the classical world, thereby bringing in voices identified with a dominant foreign culture, which for centuries was considered in the Jewish world as a symbol of complete otherness. The tension between the otherness and foreignness of classical literature and its being a considered intellectual summit and a cultural factor that influenced European literature, is a tension that illustrates the fact that Hebrew literature is based on intercultural and intertextual connections and the migration of ideas and authors from a European literary-cultural space to an Israeli-Hebrew space.
Graduate of the Honors Program for Outstanding MA Students, 2021–2023