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Stephen Katz. The Centrifugal Novel: S. Y. Agnon's Poetics of Composition. Madison and Teaneck, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1999. 219 pp.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 September 2002
Extract
Agnon studies are still with us. The great modern Hebrew prose writer has been gone for nearly three decades, but new studies in Hebrew and even in English have made it seem as if he were still in our midst. They continue to increase our understanding of his life and his oeuvre, obviously, but the immediacy of this Nobel prize laureate for his particular culture strikes me as unique among western literary figures. Speaking only of English, in this decade alone, Anne Golomb Hoffman and Nitzah Ben Dov have published full-length monographs, and scores of articles have appeared on subjects ranging from biography to intertextual exploration, and from language to folklore sources. All this is on top of an even more plentiful supply of materials from the '70s and '80s (some Israeli scholars, like Shaked, have even published in English), which followed on the heels of Arnold Band's indispensable Nostalgia and Nightmare. One has to assume that Dan Laor's comprehensive Agnon biography, Hayyei Agnon—which has just been published—will be translated into English and share its plentiful light with the purely English-speaking scholarly community. Laor's biography was not completed when Stephen Katz published The Centrifugal Novel, although several articles containing material intended for the eventual biography appeared over recent years.
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- © 2002 by the Association for Jewish Studies