"To Read Or Not To Be: Faulkner, Yehoshua, Close Reading" Yael Segalovitz

Close reading, despite numerous attempts to declare it obsolete or even harmful, persistently endures in literary studies. While its origins, methods, and political implications remain contested, one assumption has gone largely unchallenged: that close reading is primarily an anglophone phenomenon. This talk argues instead that the praxis of close reading has had a rich and influential global circulation beyond the anglophone orbit, one that sheds new light on the New Critical practice more generally. Focusing on the Hebrew writer A.B. Yehoshua, often dubbed the "Hebrew Faulkner," Segalovitz examines how Yehoshua read and implemented Faulknerian stylistics through the lens of a localized adaptation of New Criticism. Reading Yehoshua from this perspective also uncovered unexpected facets in Faulkner's work, demonstrating that both writers viewed close reading as a tool for subject formation. For these writers, it was indeed a question of "to read or not to be"—close reading, in their view, cultivated readers' ability to temporarily suspend their subjectivity and thus allow the autonomous voice of the literary text to resonate within them.

Yael Segalovitz, a scholar and translator specializing in global modernisms, is an assistant professor at Ben Gurion University of the Negev (BGU), currently spending the year as a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley (UCB). Her recently published book, How Close Reading Made Us (SUNY), follows the 20th century global circulation of close reading as a technique of the self from the US to Brazil and Israel. Her work has appeared in Modern Fiction Studies, Arizona Quarterly, Textual Practice, and symplokē, among other venues. She hosts the podcast, Psychoanaliterature, which follows key figures in literary studies and psychoanalysis, including Judith Butler, Maggie Nelson, and Jane Gallop.

This talk is a part of the Israel in Context Lecture Series.

Host or Publisher Schusterman Center for Jewish Studies