Poetics of Becoming: Dynamic Processes of Mythopoesis in Modern and Postmodern Hebrew and Slavic Literature

by Professor of Literature Roman Katsman, Horst-Jurgen Gerigk, Urs Heftrich

If myth is, as Aleksei Losev formulated it, a miraculous personality's history given in words, literary mythopoesis is a becoming of narrative personality and its myth in the time of reading. In his previous book The Time of Cruel Miracles the author developed the theory of literary mythopoesis and its research methodology. The present investigation focuses on the question of what this emergent narrative personality precisely is. The study refers to a wide range of texts. It contributes to further discussion of the poetics of Russian and Hebrew classics (F. Dostoevsky and M. Bulgakov, S.Y. Agnon and A. Oz), applies new methods of multicultural literature studies (I. Babel, L. Lunz, and O. Mandelstam), observes prominent features of postmodern Israeli literature and mythopoesis (O. Castel-Bloom, M. Shalev, E. Keret), and proposes a key for understanding the poetics of the Serbian writer M. Pavić .

270 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2005