Yael Halevi-Wise

 Yael Halevi-Wise
Contact Information
Phone: 
514-398-1013
Email address: 
yael.haleviwise [at] mcgill.ca
Address: 

Leacock 831
Leacock Building, 7th floor
855 Sherbrooke Street West
Montreal, QC H3A 2T7
Canada

Group: 
Faculty Members
Position: 
Associate Professor
Stream: 
Literature
Specialization by geographical area: 
Great Britain
Specialization by time period: 
19th-Century
Area(s): 
Fiction
History & Theory of the Novel
Areas of interest: 

19th-century novels (especially Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Benjamin Disraeli); history of the novel as a literary form; comparative analyses of the novel as a genre across time and different cultures; cultural representations of Jews and Judaism in modern literary fiction.

Biography: 

Since I began to work professionally on literature in the 1990s, my main motivation has been to understand how the novel “works” as a genre and how it morphs over time across different cultures. My first book, Interactive Fictions: Scenes of Storytelling in the Novel (Prager/Bloomsbury, 1996) enabled me to create a foundation for my understanding of literary forms as an interactive process that arises out of dynamic arguments among storyteller and audiences with specific cultural expectations about their storytelling in their respective milieus. Thanks to these arguments, their expectations change and artistic forms are continuously transformed. I examined these processes in several literary traditions, including 19th C. England, 17th C. Spain, contemporary Israel, and contemporary Latin America. This range of choices emerged in part from my own multicultural background as an Israeli who grew up in Mexico and studied English and Comparative Literature in Israel and the United States. In 2012, I spearheaded a volume about representations of Spanish Jewish history in the modern literary imagination (Stanford, 2012). More recently in The Retrospective Imagination of A.B. Yehoshua (Penn State UP, 2020) I worked on the entire oeuvre of this leading Israeli novelist and public intellectual, who recently passed away (z”l). I continue at the same time to be fascinated by the works of the great 19th Century English novelists, especially Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, Charlotte Brönte, George Eliot, and most recently have become more interested in Benjamin Disraeli.

Degree(s): 

Ph.D. (Princeton)
M.A. (Georgetown) 
B.A. (Hebrew University of Jerusalem)

Current research: 

Impact of ChatGPT on our teaching; Charles Dickens’s narrative techniques; A.B. Yehoshua in a comparative context, e.g. vis-à-vis Faulkner, Dickens, Agnon, Kafka, Joyce, Woolf, Camus.

Selected publications: 

Articles and Book Chapters

“The Mystery of Edwin Drood,” in A Companion to Charles Dickens-Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture, Ed. David Paroissien (forthcoming).

“A. B. Yehoshua and the Novel of Vocation,” Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History 37 (2019): 688-710 (special issue in memory of Alan Mintz z”l).

“Hebrew Literature in the ‘World Republic of Letters’: Translation and Reception, 1918-2018” (with Madeleine Gottesman), Israel Studies Review 33.2 (2018): 1-25.

"The Watchman’s Stance in A. B. Yehoshua’s Fiction," Hebrew Studies 58 (2017): 357-382.

"Holidays in A. B. Yeshoshua's Opus and Ethos," Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal Studies 35.2 (2017): 55-80.

“Unflattening Mrs. Micawber,” Dickens Quarterly 33.3 (2016): 201-222.

“La formation d’une identité israélienne dans l’œuvre de A.B. Yehoshua.” Une journée avec Avraham Yehoshua. La célibataire, revue Lacanienne 30 (2016): 161-172.

Agnon’s Conversation with Jeremiah in A Guest for the Night: `Aginut in an Age of National ModernizationAJS Review 38.2 (2014): 395-416.

Where is the Sephardism in A. B. Yehoshua’s Hesed Sefardi/The Retrospective? Sephardic Horizons 4.1 (2014).

“The Life and Times of the Picaro-Converso from Spain to Latin America,” in Sephardism, Ed. Y. Halevi-Wise (Stanford UP, 2012):143-66.

"A Taste of Sepharad from the Suburbs of Mexico: Rosa Nissan's Ladino in Novia que te vea and Hisho que te nazca," in Sephardic Identity in the Americas, Ed. M. Bejarano and E. Aizenberg (Syracuse UP, 2012).

"Reading Agnon's In the Prime of Her Life in Light of Freud's Dora," Jewish Quarterly Review 98.1 (2008): 29-40.

"'The Double Triangle Paradigm' in Hebrew Fiction: National Redemption in Bigenerational Love Triangles from Agnon to Oz," Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History 26 (2006): 309-343.

"Ethics and Aesthetics of Memory in Contemporary Mizrahi Literature," The Journal of Israeli History 20.1 (Spring 2001): 49-66.

"Little Dorrit's Story," The Dickensian 94.446 (1998): 184-94.

"The Rhetoric of Silence in Conrad's Lord Jim," Anatomies of Silence (1998): 98-105.

"Storytelling in Like Water for Chocolate," The Other Mirror (1997): 123-131.

"The Play within the Play as a Model of Fictionality," Mundos de Ficcion II (1996): 899-91.

Reviews

“Zeruya Shalev’s Pain, Words Without Borders (January 2020)

Gilead Moragh, “Compassion and Fury: On the Fiction of A. B. Yehoshua,” Hebrew Studies 56 (2015): 101-104.

Dan Miron, From Continuity to Contiguity: Toward a New Jewish Literary Thinking, Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas. 11.1 (2013): 173-77.

Deborah Starr and Sasson Somekh, Eds. Mongrels or Marvels: The Levantine Writings of Jacqueline Shohet Kahanoff, Sephardic Horizons 2.1 (Winter 2012).

Yael Feldman, Glory and Agony: Isaac’s Sacrifice and National Narrative, Shofar 30.4 (2012).

Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, Booking Passage: Exile and Homecoming in the Modern Jewish Imagination. Criticism 42.4 (2000): 484-87.

Awards, honours, and fellowships: 
  • Visiting Professor, Department of Hebrew and Comparative Literature, Haifa University, Spring 2016
  • Visiting Professor, Paris INALCO, Fall 2015
  • SSHRC Standard Research Grant, 2006-09
  • FQRSC Programme pour l'établissement de nouveau professeurs-chercheurs, 2006-09
  • Lady Davis Fellowship, 2008-09
  • W. and F. Hewlett Foundation, "Strengthening Interdisciplinary Connections", 2001
  • Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship, 2000-01
  • Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, 2007, 2000
Graduate supervision: 

1) I particularly welcome students interested in thinking about the novel as a genre: its characteristics in any given period - esp. 19th C. - and its transformations across history and different cultures. 2) I also enjoy supervising creative writing theses, an option that enables students to produce original primary accompanied by a serious scholarly assessment of literary voice, structure and form. 3) As a joint professor of Jewish Studies and English, I’m able to assist students interested in unpacking the fraught history of literary representation of Jews and Judaism in the modern imagination.

Taught previously at: 

Brandeis University
Cornell University
Princeton University

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