Stanford University Press Blog

The Everyman of Poetry

The quiet subversiveness of Yehuda Amichai’s poetry has been too long overlooked.

by CHANA KRONFELD

Yehuda Amichai reading at Tmol Shilshom café in Jerusalem, June 1994. Photo by Yair Medina. CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

My first meeting with Yehuda Amichai, in the fall of 1970, was what we call in Hebrew a chavaya metakenet, a “corrective” or “healing experience,” one that mends a messy or unpleasant earlier experience. Overeager and all too young, I was trying to put together a series called “Rendezvous with an Author” for Israeli Educational Television, which would allow high school students to meet with cutting-edge Hebrew writers in a relaxed roundtable discussion of the writers’ work. I was still reeling from a failed attempt to produce the series’ pilot: an author whose stories I adored was so sadistically cruel to the young students that we had to stop the taping! And then it came to me—Yehuda Amichai, of course.

He was invested in not playing the role of the Great Poet.

Having gotten into the habit of reading his poetry daily for my own emotional sustenance since age fifteen, I was sure: Yes, Amichai would be the one to start with. He would know how to connect with the students and put them at ease; he would be able to talk about the most complex poetic issues with utter simplicity and without egocentric affectation. I had never met him before, but from everything I heard, he was invested in not playing the role of the Great Poet—even though by 1970 his status as the most revolutionary, indeed the most important poet of the Statehood Generation (dor ha-mdina) had solidified and he was acquiring an international reputation. Regardless, he was synonymous with unpretentiousness. And indeed, in his Everyman appearance and unaffected manner, Amichai proceeded to treat the students as his equals, joking his way into all our hearts, and thus the series was off to an exciting start. That experience was the beginning of my lifelong friendship with the man and the catalyst for my dedication to study and teach the work of the poet.

Why Study Literature?

Reading expands our social imaginations and literary criticism can tell us why.

by PAULA M. L. MOYA

Public domain via Pixabay.

Since the beginning of my career I have worked extensively on issues concerning race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality, in the context of modern thought and literature. As such, I have been challenged (by students, colleagues, institutional mandates, and other pressures) to demonstrate how literary criticism might contribute to an understanding of these world-making social fictions. This question has been made all the more poignant, on the one hand, by the strides in the natural and social science literature on these issues, and on the other, by the perceived crisis in humanities writ large and the role of literary studies in particular in contemporary education.

What is the power of a work of literature to affect a reader’s perception of his or her world?

When I began graduate school, there was a shared belief among a sizeable portion of the profession regarding the political efficacy of cultural critique. Throughout the late 1980s and into the ’90s, this excitement was manifested in the rock star status within literary criticism of a few academics, of whom Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, Edward Said, and Fredric Jameson were the most prominent. But by the late 1990s the shine of these academic luminaries had faded, and the time of theory and its attendant methods seemed to be in retreat. In response we’ve seen a variety of new approaches that constitute nothing less than a field-wide search for method—from broadening the purview of the discipline (to include video games, graphic novels, and electronic media) to pioneering new methodologies (including the emergent field of quantitative literary analysis).

Yet not all literary critics have responded to the sense of crisis by looking beyond the traditional objects or boundaries of our discipline. Some have retrenched, turning their gaze inward, in order to advocate a kind of a “doing what we do, but doing it better.” The questions they raise are theoretical and methodological: What is the power of a work of literature to affect a reader’s perception of his or her world? How might a nuanced and insightful interpretation of a given text affect our perception of that text—and by extension, of the worlds it represents?

Does Immigration Hurt the Economy?

The answer may lie in politics.

by GARETT JONES

CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr.

One of the big questions that rich countries face today is what to do about immigration. And one of the most controversial questions is whether to admit large numbers of migrants who are less skilled than average. Will a bigger supply of workers push down wages, as in the classic model of supply and demand? Will the new migrants vote for policies that weaken the very prosperity that they came to enjoy? Or instead will Adam Smith’s invisible hand somehow make it all work out for the best?

From a purely economic perspective, there’s little evidence that current migration levels in the U.S. are pushing down most workers’ wages.

From a purely economic perspective, there’s little evidence that current migration levels in the U.S. are pushing down most workers’ wages. Economists have long investigated what less-skilled immigration does to the wages of “native” home-country workers. For the rich countries, especially for the well-studied United States, the answer is clear: less-skilled immigration doesn’t do much to the wages of most longtime residents. The most pessimistic peer-reviewed estimate comes from Harvard economists George Borjas and Larry Katz, who reported that less-skilled immigration may have pushed down the wages of American high school dropouts by 8 percent. That’s a real loss—I would be upset if I had to take an 8 percent wage cut—but it’s the most pessimistic of the widely cited estimates.

The Six Virtues of Intelligence

How IQ fosters the virtues that gave rise to the modern commercial world.

by GARETT JONES

 

People who do well on IQ tests are different from other people. On average, they remember more facts, they’re better at solving block puzzles and they’re better at reciting a list of numbers in reverse order. But IQ predicts more than just conventional mental skills: IQ predicts virtue as well.

An outrageous claim, but let’s make the outrageous claim concrete. Let’s see whether higher IQ not only predicts but even helps to create a particular set of virtues: the seven cardinal virtues, central to economist Deirdre McCloskey’s influential book The Bourgeois Virtues. These seven consist of the four classical virtues—prudence, temperance, fortitude, justice—along with the three Christian virtues—faith, hope, and love. McCloskey argues that the rise of the modern commercial world—the capitalist world—depended crucially on these seven virtues. Capitalism depends on hope for a better future, prudent financial decisions, and all the rest.

How Test Scores Explain Inequality

Why slight variations in IQ can mean a world of difference for nations (an infographic).

 

“Outside of a few countries with abundant natural resources, the most important productive asset in each nation is the human mind,” writes author and economics professor, Garett Jones. In his new book, Hive Mind, Jones argues that while standardized tests can’t tell us everything about how productive the mind is, they do reveal quite a lot about a country’s overall prosperity—more than most would think. 

Average national test scores, while not a perfect statistic, still provide a remarkably robust metric for a nation’s overall well-being. As it turns out, the cognitive skills that those scores roughly index, predict nation-wide traits of financial prudence, social cohesion, and political integrity—all significant components to a country’s overall prosperity. The following infographic—drawing on an array of economic and cognitive data analyzed in Hive Mind—distills in broad brushstrokes a few of Jones’s key arguments, showing how your nation’s IQ matters so much more than your own.