Yael Segalovitz | Ben Gurion University of the Negev (original) (raw)
Books by Yael Segalovitz
How Close Reading Made Us demonstrates how the method of close reading traveled from the United S... more How Close Reading Made Us demonstrates how the method of close reading traveled from the United States to Brazil and Israel, revealing its profound impact on global modernisms and reframing the lasting significance of the New Critical practice. For more, see https://sunypress.edu/Books/H/How-Close-Reading-Made-Us
Aviva-No, 2019
This introduction to the translation of Shimon Adaf's Aviva-No explores Adaf's linguistic flexibi... more This introduction to the translation of Shimon Adaf's Aviva-No explores Adaf's linguistic flexibility in this collection, along with its political and affective valence.
Papers by Yael Segalovitz
American Book Review, Jun 1, 2022
This essay explores the nature of psychoanalysis’ conspicuous presence in the bourgeoning genre o... more This essay explores the nature of psychoanalysis’ conspicuous presence in the bourgeoning genre of autotheory through Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s A Dialogue on Love (1999). A Dialogue takes place between the four walls of the therapeutic space, as Eve and her analyst, Shannon Van Wey, take turns in recounting the story of their sessions and bond. I propose that Sedgwick and Van Wey’s interaction also proposes a unique theorization of intersubjectivity that combines the psychoanalytic and the queer perspectives.
Dibur , 2024
“Enough” is a slippery signifier — it is never clear enough, or else it always means too much. In... more “Enough” is a slippery signifier — it is never clear enough, or else it always means too much. In this inquiry, we investigate the social and psychic work that “enough” performs. We do so by following an associative series of narrative instantiations that demonstrate how enoughness holds the paradoxical capacity to signal both sufficiency and excess simultaneously. By close reading polyvocal, genre-hybrid texts (from Hélène Cixous reading Sigmund Freud and Clarice Lispector to Maggie Nelson reading Eve Sedgwick), we examine the capacity of enoughness to produce and reproduce psychic violence in the same stroke as it opens up a horizon of recuperative potentiality. As we pan across these intertextual dialogues, Donald Winnicott provides a metaphoric figure for the relative and relational nature of enoughness; from the “good enough mother,” we probe the relational prospects of “a good enough language” and its embodied effects and affects. As a threshold and as a speech act, as a gesture and an imaginary, “enough,” we argue, operates against the capitalist imperative “to have,” while setting and transgressing limits between subjects. Ultimately, the dialectic between sufficiency and excess enables “enough” to express both a boundary and the lack thereof, a finite form and its indefinite expanse. “Enough,” as it were, isn’t enough to anticipate or determine the reach of its own relational effects.
Textual Practice, 2023
This article explores the emergence of a new textual tendency in turn-of-the-millennium United St... more This article explores the emergence of a new textual tendency in turn-of-the-millennium United States, where psychoanalytic theory, fiction writing, self-writing, and literary scholarship converge. I call the body of works established at this conjunction ‘psychoanaliterature’. My analysis looks at two examples, Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother? (2012) and Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts (2015). I argue that at the centre of these two works, paradigmatic of psychoanaliterature writ large, there lies an interrelational model of subjectivity, which draws on the psychoanalytic school of Object Relations, Freud’s foundational self-analysis project, and on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s queer relationality, and is charged with a political valence via its push against the North American ideal of self-sufficiency.
Modern Fiction Studies (MFS), 2023
The last decade witnessed a blooming interest in Faulkner's soundscapes, but his conceptualizatio... more The last decade witnessed a blooming interest in Faulkner's soundscapes, but his conceptualization of readerly listening has yet to be thoroughly discussed. This essay argues that, in The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner cultivates a specific phenomenology—a negative audition—in his reader that holds an ethical valence: an attunement to sonic stimuli, which one is socially and bodily taught to register as inaudible. These internal readerly guidelines paradoxically advance a reading of Faulkner's novel against its own racial bias.
American Book Review, 2022
This essay explores the nature of psychoanalysis’ conspicuous presence in the bourgeoning genre o... more This essay explores the nature of psychoanalysis’ conspicuous presence in the bourgeoning genre of autotheory through Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s A Dialogue on Love (1999). A Dialogue takes place between the four walls of the therapeutic space, as Eve and her analyst, Shannon Van Wey, take turns in recounting the story of their sessions and bond. I propose that Sedgwick and Van Wey’s interaction also proposes a unique theorization of intersubjectivity that combines the psychoanalytic and the queer perspectives.
Playing on John Crowe Ransom’s iconic “Criticism Inc.,” my dissertation, New Criticism Int.: The ... more Playing on John Crowe Ransom’s iconic “Criticism Inc.,” my dissertation, New Criticism Int.: The Close Reader in the U.S., Brazil and Israel, reveals the as yet unexplored global circulation of the North American theory of New Criticism, and its influence on international reading practices, literary production, and national identity construction. The dissertation follows the theory as it travels from North America to Brazil and Israel, where New Criticism combines with regional trends to provoke a radical institutional and cultural change. This new map provides a fresh model for understanding close reading, New Criticism’s key practice, which remains the prevailing method of critical reading taught in American institutions and abroad. The New Critics, it is usually assumed, believed that close reading involved a self-enclosed aesthetic object and a detached reader who contemplates the text but takes no part in constructing its meaning. New Criticism Int. demonstrates by contrast tha...
ArXiv, 2020
Fields such as the philosophy of language, continental philosophy, and literary studies have long... more Fields such as the philosophy of language, continental philosophy, and literary studies have long established that human language is, at its essence, ambiguous and that this quality, although challenging to communication, enriches language and points to the complexity of human thought. On the other hand, in the NLP field there have been ongoing efforts aimed at disambiguation for various downstream tasks. This work brings together computational text analysis and literary analysis to demonstrate the extent to which ambiguity in certain texts plays a key role in shaping meaning and thus requires analysis rather than elimination. We revisit the discussion, well known in the humanities, about the role ambiguity plays in Henry James' 19th century novella, The Turn of the Screw. We model each of the novella's two competing interpretations as a topic and computationally demonstrate that the duality between them exists consistently throughout the work and shapes, rather than obscure...
This article offers a queer reading of Shimon Adaf’s volume of poetry, Aviva-No (2009), analyzing... more This article offers a queer reading of Shimon Adaf’s volume of poetry, Aviva-No (2009), analyzing it in conjunction with his recent collection of essays on identity formation, Ani aherim (I am others) (2018). Adaf’s oeuvre has been primarily studied through the lens of ethnicity and race. This article demonstrates that gender plays a key role in his body of work. Aviva-No, which is a lamentation for the poet’s sister, destabilizes the boundaries between the mourning brother and the absent sister. This ontological deconstruction stimulates in Aviva-No a broader undoing of gender as an embodied identity. The volume is replete with what I refer to as “plural bodies,” fictional figures who transgress binaries of gender, sexuality, and sex, by simultaneously inhabiting at least two points on the continuum between these poles. Moreover, through the mobilization of gender identity in Aviva-No, Adaf queers contemporary identity politics in Israel. This discourse, he maintains, forces the su...
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
Dedicated to the dissemination of scholarly and professional information, Purdue University Press... more Dedicated to the dissemination of scholarly and professional information, Purdue University Press selects, develops, and distributes quality resources in several key subject areas for which its parent university is famous, including business, technology, health, veterinary medicine, and other selected disciplines in the humanities and sciences. CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, the peer-reviewed, full-text, and open-access learned journal in the humanities and social sciences, publishes new scholarship following tenets of the discipline of comparative literature and the field of cultural studies designated as "comparative cultural studies." Publications in the journal are indexed in the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (Chadwyck-Healey), the Arts and Humanities Citation Index (Thomson Reuters ISI), the Humanities Index (Wilson), Humanities International Complete (EBSCO), the International Bibliography of the Modern Language Association of America, and Scopus (Elsevier). The journal is affiliated with the Purdue University Press monograph series of Books in Comparative Cultural Studies. Contact:
Freud and Monotheism
Freud and Monotheism: Moses and the Violent Origins of Religion brings together fundamental new c... more Freud and Monotheism: Moses and the Violent Origins of Religion brings together fundamental new contributions to discourses on Freud and Moses, as well as new research on the intersections of theology, political theory, and history in Freud’s psychoanalytic work. Highlighting the broad impact of Moses and Monotheism across the humanities, the contributors hail from such diverse disciplines as philosophy, comparative literature, cultural studies, German literature, Jewish studies and psychoanalysis.
Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory
This article challenges the assumption that close reading is an apolitical and ahistorical practi... more This article challenges the assumption that close reading is an apolitical and ahistorical practice by reading Cleanth Brooks’ The Well Wrought Urn alongside his seminal work on William Faulkner. These texts expose the crucial role “attention” plays in the formation of close reading, and demonstrate that at the heart of American New Criticism there lies a notion of reading that assumes a unique capacity for animating otherness. Brooks labors to cultivate in his reader an attentiveness so profound as to lead to self-deadening. However, this self-erasure is not a solely negative process in his mind, since it allows the reader an intimate encounter with the literary text as alterity. This New Critical model of reading unexpectedly corresponds to Jacques Derrida’s hauntological ethics. By bringing into dialogue Brooks, Faulkner, and Derrida, this essay offers a new view of the values that underlie close reading as a contemporary method of literary interpretation.
The Hour of the Star , 2020
Critical Introduction to the Hebrew Translation of The Hour of the Star [She’at ha-Kokhav] by Cla... more Critical Introduction to the Hebrew Translation of The Hour of the Star [She’at ha-Kokhav] by Clarice Lispector. Trans. Miriam Tivon
Psyche on Campos , 2021
How to teach psychoanalysis in the classroom in the midst of a global pandemic? Can one make anal... more How to teach psychoanalysis in the classroom in the midst of a global pandemic? Can one make analytic concepts come to life via virtual pedagogy? We've faced this challenge by launching an experimental podcast designed specifically to fit our classroom goals. In this essay, we share our experience and the surprising insights it provoked.
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, 2020
This article offers a queer reading of Shimon Adaf’s volume of poetry, Aviva-No (2009), analyzing... more This article offers a queer reading of Shimon Adaf’s volume of poetry, Aviva-No (2009), analyzing it in conjunction with his recent collection of essays on identity formation, Ani aherim (I am others) (2018). Adaf’s oeuvre has been primarily studied through the lens of ethnicity and race. This article demonstrates that gender plays a key role in his body of work. Aviva-No, which is a lamentation for the poet’s sister, destabilizes the boundaries between the mourning brother and the absent sister.
This ontological deconstruction stimulates in Aviva-No a broader undoing of gender as an embodied identity. The volume is replete with what I refer to as “plural bodies,” fictional figures who transgress
binaries of gender, sexuality, and sex, by simultaneously inhabiting at least two points on the continuum between these poles. Moreover, through the mobilization of gender identity in Aviva-No, Adaf queers
contemporary identity politics in Israel. This discourse, he maintains, forces the subject to narrow down her self-understanding to a set of predetermined attitudes and values, which results in the perpetuation
of hostility between reified versions of self and others in Israeli society. Aviva-No counters the perilous project of solidifying identity by demonstrating the extent to which even sex, which points to bodily
materiality, is a category that is not one.
![Research paper thumbnail of The Ghosts of New Criticism [Hebrew]](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/62437519/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](OT: A Journal of Literary Criticism and Theory, 2020
Arizona Quarterly , 2019
This article challenges the assumption that close reading is an apolitical and ahistorical practi... more This article challenges the assumption that close reading is an apolitical and ahistorical practice by reading Cleanth Brooks’ The Well Wrought Urn alongside his seminal work on William Faulkner. These texts expose the crucial role “attention” plays in the formation of close reading, and demonstrate that at the heart of American New Criticism there lies a notion of reading that assumes a unique capacity for animating otherness. Brooks labors to cultivate in his reader an attentiveness so profound as to lead to self-deadening. However, this self-erasure is not a solely negative process in his mind, since it allows the reader an intimate encounter with the literary text as alterity. This New Critical model of reading unexpectedly corresponds to Jacques Derrida’s hauntological ethics. By bringing into dialogue Brooks, Faulkner, and Derrida, this essay offers a new view of the values that underlie close reading as a contemporary method of literary interpretation.
An exploration of Sigmund Freud's "Moses and Monotheism" from a literary point of view, comparing... more An exploration of Sigmund Freud's "Moses and Monotheism" from a literary point of view, comparing its implicit theory of reading with the Anglo-American New Critical method of "close reading."
A critical introduction to Miriam Tivon's translation into Hebrew of Clarice Lispector' Perto do ... more A critical introduction to Miriam Tivon's translation into Hebrew of Clarice Lispector' Perto do Coração Selvagem.
How Close Reading Made Us demonstrates how the method of close reading traveled from the United S... more How Close Reading Made Us demonstrates how the method of close reading traveled from the United States to Brazil and Israel, revealing its profound impact on global modernisms and reframing the lasting significance of the New Critical practice. For more, see https://sunypress.edu/Books/H/How-Close-Reading-Made-Us
Aviva-No, 2019
This introduction to the translation of Shimon Adaf's Aviva-No explores Adaf's linguistic flexibi... more This introduction to the translation of Shimon Adaf's Aviva-No explores Adaf's linguistic flexibility in this collection, along with its political and affective valence.
American Book Review, Jun 1, 2022
This essay explores the nature of psychoanalysis’ conspicuous presence in the bourgeoning genre o... more This essay explores the nature of psychoanalysis’ conspicuous presence in the bourgeoning genre of autotheory through Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s A Dialogue on Love (1999). A Dialogue takes place between the four walls of the therapeutic space, as Eve and her analyst, Shannon Van Wey, take turns in recounting the story of their sessions and bond. I propose that Sedgwick and Van Wey’s interaction also proposes a unique theorization of intersubjectivity that combines the psychoanalytic and the queer perspectives.
Dibur , 2024
“Enough” is a slippery signifier — it is never clear enough, or else it always means too much. In... more “Enough” is a slippery signifier — it is never clear enough, or else it always means too much. In this inquiry, we investigate the social and psychic work that “enough” performs. We do so by following an associative series of narrative instantiations that demonstrate how enoughness holds the paradoxical capacity to signal both sufficiency and excess simultaneously. By close reading polyvocal, genre-hybrid texts (from Hélène Cixous reading Sigmund Freud and Clarice Lispector to Maggie Nelson reading Eve Sedgwick), we examine the capacity of enoughness to produce and reproduce psychic violence in the same stroke as it opens up a horizon of recuperative potentiality. As we pan across these intertextual dialogues, Donald Winnicott provides a metaphoric figure for the relative and relational nature of enoughness; from the “good enough mother,” we probe the relational prospects of “a good enough language” and its embodied effects and affects. As a threshold and as a speech act, as a gesture and an imaginary, “enough,” we argue, operates against the capitalist imperative “to have,” while setting and transgressing limits between subjects. Ultimately, the dialectic between sufficiency and excess enables “enough” to express both a boundary and the lack thereof, a finite form and its indefinite expanse. “Enough,” as it were, isn’t enough to anticipate or determine the reach of its own relational effects.
Textual Practice, 2023
This article explores the emergence of a new textual tendency in turn-of-the-millennium United St... more This article explores the emergence of a new textual tendency in turn-of-the-millennium United States, where psychoanalytic theory, fiction writing, self-writing, and literary scholarship converge. I call the body of works established at this conjunction ‘psychoanaliterature’. My analysis looks at two examples, Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother? (2012) and Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts (2015). I argue that at the centre of these two works, paradigmatic of psychoanaliterature writ large, there lies an interrelational model of subjectivity, which draws on the psychoanalytic school of Object Relations, Freud’s foundational self-analysis project, and on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s queer relationality, and is charged with a political valence via its push against the North American ideal of self-sufficiency.
Modern Fiction Studies (MFS), 2023
The last decade witnessed a blooming interest in Faulkner's soundscapes, but his conceptualizatio... more The last decade witnessed a blooming interest in Faulkner's soundscapes, but his conceptualization of readerly listening has yet to be thoroughly discussed. This essay argues that, in The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner cultivates a specific phenomenology—a negative audition—in his reader that holds an ethical valence: an attunement to sonic stimuli, which one is socially and bodily taught to register as inaudible. These internal readerly guidelines paradoxically advance a reading of Faulkner's novel against its own racial bias.
American Book Review, 2022
This essay explores the nature of psychoanalysis’ conspicuous presence in the bourgeoning genre o... more This essay explores the nature of psychoanalysis’ conspicuous presence in the bourgeoning genre of autotheory through Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s A Dialogue on Love (1999). A Dialogue takes place between the four walls of the therapeutic space, as Eve and her analyst, Shannon Van Wey, take turns in recounting the story of their sessions and bond. I propose that Sedgwick and Van Wey’s interaction also proposes a unique theorization of intersubjectivity that combines the psychoanalytic and the queer perspectives.
Playing on John Crowe Ransom’s iconic “Criticism Inc.,” my dissertation, New Criticism Int.: The ... more Playing on John Crowe Ransom’s iconic “Criticism Inc.,” my dissertation, New Criticism Int.: The Close Reader in the U.S., Brazil and Israel, reveals the as yet unexplored global circulation of the North American theory of New Criticism, and its influence on international reading practices, literary production, and national identity construction. The dissertation follows the theory as it travels from North America to Brazil and Israel, where New Criticism combines with regional trends to provoke a radical institutional and cultural change. This new map provides a fresh model for understanding close reading, New Criticism’s key practice, which remains the prevailing method of critical reading taught in American institutions and abroad. The New Critics, it is usually assumed, believed that close reading involved a self-enclosed aesthetic object and a detached reader who contemplates the text but takes no part in constructing its meaning. New Criticism Int. demonstrates by contrast tha...
ArXiv, 2020
Fields such as the philosophy of language, continental philosophy, and literary studies have long... more Fields such as the philosophy of language, continental philosophy, and literary studies have long established that human language is, at its essence, ambiguous and that this quality, although challenging to communication, enriches language and points to the complexity of human thought. On the other hand, in the NLP field there have been ongoing efforts aimed at disambiguation for various downstream tasks. This work brings together computational text analysis and literary analysis to demonstrate the extent to which ambiguity in certain texts plays a key role in shaping meaning and thus requires analysis rather than elimination. We revisit the discussion, well known in the humanities, about the role ambiguity plays in Henry James' 19th century novella, The Turn of the Screw. We model each of the novella's two competing interpretations as a topic and computationally demonstrate that the duality between them exists consistently throughout the work and shapes, rather than obscure...
This article offers a queer reading of Shimon Adaf’s volume of poetry, Aviva-No (2009), analyzing... more This article offers a queer reading of Shimon Adaf’s volume of poetry, Aviva-No (2009), analyzing it in conjunction with his recent collection of essays on identity formation, Ani aherim (I am others) (2018). Adaf’s oeuvre has been primarily studied through the lens of ethnicity and race. This article demonstrates that gender plays a key role in his body of work. Aviva-No, which is a lamentation for the poet’s sister, destabilizes the boundaries between the mourning brother and the absent sister. This ontological deconstruction stimulates in Aviva-No a broader undoing of gender as an embodied identity. The volume is replete with what I refer to as “plural bodies,” fictional figures who transgress binaries of gender, sexuality, and sex, by simultaneously inhabiting at least two points on the continuum between these poles. Moreover, through the mobilization of gender identity in Aviva-No, Adaf queers contemporary identity politics in Israel. This discourse, he maintains, forces the su...
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
Dedicated to the dissemination of scholarly and professional information, Purdue University Press... more Dedicated to the dissemination of scholarly and professional information, Purdue University Press selects, develops, and distributes quality resources in several key subject areas for which its parent university is famous, including business, technology, health, veterinary medicine, and other selected disciplines in the humanities and sciences. CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, the peer-reviewed, full-text, and open-access learned journal in the humanities and social sciences, publishes new scholarship following tenets of the discipline of comparative literature and the field of cultural studies designated as "comparative cultural studies." Publications in the journal are indexed in the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (Chadwyck-Healey), the Arts and Humanities Citation Index (Thomson Reuters ISI), the Humanities Index (Wilson), Humanities International Complete (EBSCO), the International Bibliography of the Modern Language Association of America, and Scopus (Elsevier). The journal is affiliated with the Purdue University Press monograph series of Books in Comparative Cultural Studies. Contact:
Freud and Monotheism
Freud and Monotheism: Moses and the Violent Origins of Religion brings together fundamental new c... more Freud and Monotheism: Moses and the Violent Origins of Religion brings together fundamental new contributions to discourses on Freud and Moses, as well as new research on the intersections of theology, political theory, and history in Freud’s psychoanalytic work. Highlighting the broad impact of Moses and Monotheism across the humanities, the contributors hail from such diverse disciplines as philosophy, comparative literature, cultural studies, German literature, Jewish studies and psychoanalysis.
Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory
This article challenges the assumption that close reading is an apolitical and ahistorical practi... more This article challenges the assumption that close reading is an apolitical and ahistorical practice by reading Cleanth Brooks’ The Well Wrought Urn alongside his seminal work on William Faulkner. These texts expose the crucial role “attention” plays in the formation of close reading, and demonstrate that at the heart of American New Criticism there lies a notion of reading that assumes a unique capacity for animating otherness. Brooks labors to cultivate in his reader an attentiveness so profound as to lead to self-deadening. However, this self-erasure is not a solely negative process in his mind, since it allows the reader an intimate encounter with the literary text as alterity. This New Critical model of reading unexpectedly corresponds to Jacques Derrida’s hauntological ethics. By bringing into dialogue Brooks, Faulkner, and Derrida, this essay offers a new view of the values that underlie close reading as a contemporary method of literary interpretation.
The Hour of the Star , 2020
Critical Introduction to the Hebrew Translation of The Hour of the Star [She’at ha-Kokhav] by Cla... more Critical Introduction to the Hebrew Translation of The Hour of the Star [She’at ha-Kokhav] by Clarice Lispector. Trans. Miriam Tivon
Psyche on Campos , 2021
How to teach psychoanalysis in the classroom in the midst of a global pandemic? Can one make anal... more How to teach psychoanalysis in the classroom in the midst of a global pandemic? Can one make analytic concepts come to life via virtual pedagogy? We've faced this challenge by launching an experimental podcast designed specifically to fit our classroom goals. In this essay, we share our experience and the surprising insights it provoked.
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, 2020
This article offers a queer reading of Shimon Adaf’s volume of poetry, Aviva-No (2009), analyzing... more This article offers a queer reading of Shimon Adaf’s volume of poetry, Aviva-No (2009), analyzing it in conjunction with his recent collection of essays on identity formation, Ani aherim (I am others) (2018). Adaf’s oeuvre has been primarily studied through the lens of ethnicity and race. This article demonstrates that gender plays a key role in his body of work. Aviva-No, which is a lamentation for the poet’s sister, destabilizes the boundaries between the mourning brother and the absent sister.
This ontological deconstruction stimulates in Aviva-No a broader undoing of gender as an embodied identity. The volume is replete with what I refer to as “plural bodies,” fictional figures who transgress
binaries of gender, sexuality, and sex, by simultaneously inhabiting at least two points on the continuum between these poles. Moreover, through the mobilization of gender identity in Aviva-No, Adaf queers
contemporary identity politics in Israel. This discourse, he maintains, forces the subject to narrow down her self-understanding to a set of predetermined attitudes and values, which results in the perpetuation
of hostility between reified versions of self and others in Israeli society. Aviva-No counters the perilous project of solidifying identity by demonstrating the extent to which even sex, which points to bodily
materiality, is a category that is not one.
OT: A Journal of Literary Criticism and Theory, 2020
Arizona Quarterly , 2019
This article challenges the assumption that close reading is an apolitical and ahistorical practi... more This article challenges the assumption that close reading is an apolitical and ahistorical practice by reading Cleanth Brooks’ The Well Wrought Urn alongside his seminal work on William Faulkner. These texts expose the crucial role “attention” plays in the formation of close reading, and demonstrate that at the heart of American New Criticism there lies a notion of reading that assumes a unique capacity for animating otherness. Brooks labors to cultivate in his reader an attentiveness so profound as to lead to self-deadening. However, this self-erasure is not a solely negative process in his mind, since it allows the reader an intimate encounter with the literary text as alterity. This New Critical model of reading unexpectedly corresponds to Jacques Derrida’s hauntological ethics. By bringing into dialogue Brooks, Faulkner, and Derrida, this essay offers a new view of the values that underlie close reading as a contemporary method of literary interpretation.
An exploration of Sigmund Freud's "Moses and Monotheism" from a literary point of view, comparing... more An exploration of Sigmund Freud's "Moses and Monotheism" from a literary point of view, comparing its implicit theory of reading with the Anglo-American New Critical method of "close reading."
A critical introduction to Miriam Tivon's translation into Hebrew of Clarice Lispector' Perto do ... more A critical introduction to Miriam Tivon's translation into Hebrew of Clarice Lispector' Perto do Coração Selvagem.
Critical Introduction to my translation of Clarice Lispector's "A Via Crucis do Corpo" into Hebre... more Critical Introduction to my translation of Clarice Lispector's "A Via Crucis do Corpo" into Hebrew.
World Literature Today , 2020
World Literature Today features Shimon Adaf's Aviva-No as the Winter 20202 Editor’s Pick, writing... more World Literature Today features Shimon Adaf's Aviva-No as the Winter 20202 Editor’s Pick, writing: "The brilliance of Yael Segalovitz’s translations in Aviva-No is matched by the perceptivity of her introductory note, which situates Adaf’s place as a Mizrachi Jew in contemporary Israeli society and insightfully analyzes the defamiliarizing effect of the Hebrew originals" (Daniel Simon, Editor in Chief)
The Millions , 2019
The Millions called Aviva-No by Shimon Adaf a “must-read poetry” title for November 2019.
Fields such as the philosophy of language, continental philosophy, and literary studies have long... more Fields such as the philosophy of language, continental philosophy, and literary studies have long established that human language is, at its essence, ambiguous and that this quality, although challenging to communication , enriches language and points to the complexity of human thought. On the other hand, in the NLP field there have been ongoing efforts aimed at disambiguation for various downstream tasks. This work brings together computational text analysis and literary analysis to demonstrate the extent to which ambiguity in certain texts plays a key role in shaping meaning and thus requires analysis rather than elimination. We re-visit the discussion, well known in the humanities , about the role ambiguity plays in Henry James' 19th century novella, "The Turn of the Screw." We model each of the novella's two competing interpretations as a topic and computationally demonstrate that the duality between them exists consistently throughout the work and shapes, rather than obscures, its meaning. We also demonstrate that cosine similarity and word mover's distance are sensitive enough to detect ambiguity in its most subtle literary form, despite doubts to the contrary raised by literary scholars. Our analysis is built on topic word lists and word embeddings from various sources. We first claim, and then empirically show, the interdependence between computational analysis and close reading performed by a human expert.
2021
Interviews on psychoanalysis, literature and all that lies between