General and Comparative Literature
Subject: Beyond Dichotomies – Sonnets as a Bridge Between Tensions in Modern Hebrew Poetry.
Advisor:
Abstract: Modern Hebrew poetry is marked by a conflict between two opposing camps. While the first sees itself responsible for shaping the poetic landscape of Hebrew literature, the second breaks conventions of rhyme and meter, favoring the representation of individual worlds. Against this backdrop, poets such as Dalia Ravikovitch establish a voice that fuses the formal qualities of the former with the conceptual subversions of the latter. In doing so, she gains freedom to weave together poetic tradition and personal expression, between Narcissus and the stream in which he is reflected: “Narcissus was so much in love with himself / Only a fool doesn't understand / he loved the river, too” . In my research, I explore how modern Israeli poets use the sonnet form to craft a poetic response to the dichotomies in which the subject is entangled. The sonnet is a 14-line poem, built on the structured tension between confrontation in the first eight lines and resolution in the concluding six. From its origins in early Renaissance Italy, the sonnet was used to represent inner conflict and collision. Petrarch uses it to explore the pull between religious devotion and earthly desire, between the elevated role of the poet and his personal experience. Gaspara Stampa glorifies earthly love and feminine writing, raising what her time considered “low”s to the realm of the sublime. The sonnet has long served to express contrasts between the grand and the intimate, the sacred and the mundane, the masculine and the feminine. My methodology includes a study of the Hebrew sonnet across generations and its intertextual dialogue with the Italian tradition. Additionally, I draw on affect theory, which investigates the relationship between the bodily and the cognitive, the pre-linguistic and the linguistic, the internal and the external; to examine how modern and contemporary literature challenges binary thinking.
MA Honors 2025/26