Academic  Biography

Ariel Hirschfeld

My first academic book was: “Voi, che sapete – The Dialogue of Love in Mozart’s Operas” (Zmora Bitan, 1994), a work in Musicology that reveals, with an innovative approach, that Mozart created two distinct musical modi for males and females. These Modi relate to a fundamental gender differentiation that manifest as a series of generic, formal, harmonic and orchestral differences in the music intended for male and female characters.

My book “May’im ad Nefesh – Symbolism in J. H. Brenner’s Oeuvre” (in preparation for print at Mosad Bialik publishing house), grew out of my PhD dissertation under the instruction of prof. Gershon Shaked. Instead of dealing with the problematics of the Zionist identity and the “Zionist-Meta-Narrative”, this book focuses solely on the depth structures of Brener’s literary message. My understanding of the literary message in this book was deeply influenced by Maurice Blanchot’s great work “L’espace Littéraire” (1955). With this perspective my research uncovers in Brenner’s work a polyphonic depth-structure that is fundamentally grounded in a recurrent story of Orpheus descending into the underworld in search of a muse figure that is not Eurydike but rather a male figure that is, usually, named David. Yet the homosexual inversion of the orpheic myth is not the center of this reading, rather my focus in this research was to indicate processes that connect a modern Hebrew writer- associated with the Zionist “revolution”, with processes that pulsate throughout modern western literature, and to stress that at its basis this literary message is connected to the European literary discourse.

The author to whom I dedicated the most thorough and continuous study since my first years in bachelor studies to this day is S. J. Agnon. Already while writing my dissertation I published an extensive article on the structure of the novel “Shira” —“Reading a Torso” (1994), which was a research polemic with my teachers Dan Miron  and Gershon Shaked on the conception of  Agnon’s story telling in the novelistic works. This article formed the basis for a continuous research of Agnon’s work with which I am engaged to this day. My book “Hatachlit ve hamasim – An Introduction to S. J. Agnon’s Oeuvre” that will be published soon, forms, with its ten chapters, a kind of an introductionary summary of my varied research of Agnon’s work.

Each chapter introduces a new critical approach to elementary aspects of Agnon’s work: the story, faith and tradition, irony and its breaking, the concept of love, and the later works, with a central chapter that deals with the Agnonic story through the prism of the tragic genre. With this issue I show that at the center of Agnon’s work there is a fascinating, charged, aware and evolving coping with the tragic genre, both in its classical and in the modern European novelistic forms. This topic has already appeared in the margins of Kurzweil’s work, and in Miron’s extensive work on “Tmol Shilshom” it serves a crucial role. But in my opinion the tragic genre is not associated with “Tmol Shilshom” in particular, but is rather one of the fundamental pillars of his work since its beginning. This forms the subject of my next book, on which I am working at this moment, “Ha’ikar ve Hakfira – Agnon and the Tragedy”. This work will offer a synthetichal approach that combines a literary reading with a wide bearing cultural criticism, which is necessitated, in my opinion, by the fact that Agnon’s coping with the tragic genre is always a charged, yet aware, theological contention between Jewish and “Greek” elements, with the “New Hebrew Literature” forming in this struggle a new space of encounter.

My last book, “A Tuned Harp (Kinor Aruch) – The Language of Emotions in H. N. Bialik’s Poetry” (in print), is dedicated to Bialik’s poetry. It is a vast research project that coherently introduces my understanding of poetry, which evolved over the years through study of the works of Levinas, Riffaterre, Blanchot, Kristeva and Deridda, and Gadamer’s work on poetic language (which compliments that of Blanchot’s). I present and deal with Bialik’s poetry through several interconnected perspectives: as a revolution in the understanding of emotion and language that redefines emotions in the Jewish-Hebrew culture, as a Musical-Erotic discourse, and as a Jewish-Theological discourse that develops an ancient Jewish one. I present a new understanding of Bialik’s “prophetic” stance as originating from Yehuda Ha’levi’s “prophetic” stance, and also offer a reading of Bialik’s poetry that uncovers a complex “literary space” that is positioned in relation to a melancholic space- the “space of depression”. This analysis and characterization of the “space of depression” is not only a fundamental element of poems that relate to it directly, but is also a central axis that explains and uncovers other poetic dimensions that surround it. This in turn facilitates my discussion, in a dedicated chapter, of Bialik’s unique conception of “rage”, which in turn leads to a new reading of Bialik’s poem “Be’ir ha’harega”.

In parallel to my studies of particular authors and poets, which include aside from the above mentioned also Tchernichovsky, Alterman, Goldberg and Zach, I was engaging in cultural criticism of “the new Hebrew culture” as a totality. In this criticism I was mainly influenced by the musicological works of Theodor Adorno and by the critical/theoretical works of Roland Barthes, and it includes synoptic discussions of poetry, literature, music and the plastic arts. The development of this writing has been mainly done in my essays, especially in those compiled in my book “Local Notes (Reshimot al Makom)” (2000), and it led to wide scoped academic works: “Kadima – Orientalism in Israeli Culture” (1998)- a work that was ordered by the Israel Museum and which lent the big exhibition of the same name its name, and the article “Locus and Language – Hebrew Culture in Israel 1890-1990” in Biale, David (ed.), Cultures of the Jews, New York: Shocken, 2003.

Press this link for my List of Publications and C.V. in pdf format.