Wrestling with Redemption: A. B. Yehoshua’s Retrospective Imagination

Thu, Apr 22, 2021, 12 noon to 1:15 pm Pacific Daylight Time (UTC-7)

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McGill University Professor Yael Halevi-Wise talks about her recent book about one of Israel’s foremost contemporary authors, A.B. Yehoshua.

About this Event

This online lecture by Yael Halevi-Wise, author of the new book The Retrospective Imagination of A.B. Yehoshua (2020), will explore the work and ethos of one of Israel’s foremost contemporary authors. The New York Times has called Yehoshua the “Israeli Faulkner.”

Yael Halevi-Wise, McGill University associate professor of Literature and chair of Jewish Studies, will examine how Yehoshua has become a prominent public intellectual in the eye of the Zionist storm and yet his fame – the fact that anyone is even interested in hearing his opinions about Jewish identity – rests on his impressive literary abilities. She will show how his novels engage with the here and now – in light of the past and future – to elicit a deeper conversation about core aspects of Jewish history and thought. Exploring this dynamic, Halevi-Wise will illustrate in greater detail how Yehoshua plays with the concept of “redemption” in his first novel, The Lover.

This event is free but requires registration to obtain a Zoom login. Participants can choose a ticket on Eventbrite or RSVP below.

RSVP to Event: https://ucla.in/3rvDdO4

Sponsored by the UCLA Y&S Nazarian Center for Israel Studies. Co-sponsored by the UCLA Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies and the UCLA Department of Comparative Literature.

About the Book

Yael Halevi-Wise‘s new book, The Retrospective Imagination of A.B. Yehoshua (Penn State University Press, 2020) explores the work of the internationally recognized novelist whom the New York Times has called the “Israeli Faulkner.” Instead of an exhaustive chronological-biographical account of Yehoshua’s artistic growth, Halevi-Wise’s book calls for a systematic appreciation of the author’s major themes and compositional patterns. Specifically, she argues for reading Yehoshua’s novels as reflections on the “condition of Israel,” constructed multifocally to engage four intersecting levels of signification: psychological, sociological, historical, and historiosophic.

About the Speaker

Dr. Yael Halevi-Wise is associate professor of Literature and chair of Jewish Studies at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. Her areas of interest include the theory of the novel, contemporary Israeli literature, 19th century English literature and 20th-century Latin American literature. Before coming to Montreal, she taught at Brandeis, Cornell and Princeton universities. Dr. Halevi-Wise is the author of many journal articles and several books, including most recently The Retrospective Imagination of A.B. Yehoshua (Penn State University Press, 2020). Her other books are Sephardism: Spanish/Jewish History and the Modern Literary Imagination (Stanford University Press, 2012) and Interactive Fictions: Scenes of Storytelling in the Novel (Praeger/Greenwood Press, 2003). She received her Ph.D. from Princeton University.

DISCLAIMER: The views or opinions of our guest speakers and the content of their presentations do not necessarily reflect the views of the UCLA Younes and Soraya Nazarian Center for Israel Studies. Hosting speakers does not constitute an endorsement of the speaker’s views or opinions.