Explorations in Poetics, and: La Poésie du lieu : Segalen, Thoreau, Guillevic, Ponge (review)

As Professor of Poetics and Literary Theory, the polymath Benjamin Harshav helped found the Tel-Aviv School of Constructive Poetics during the 1960s and 1970s, and currently serves at Yale as Professor of Comparative Literature, Hebrew Language and Literature, and Slavic Languages and Literatures. His Marc Chagall and His Times (Stanford, 2004) won the American Koret Award for fiction and biography. The current volume gathers essays from 1974–1989. Although Harshav’s “constructivist poetics” discusses no French figure in detail, his method is widely applicable to French studies. It addresses recent debates over the essential nature and dynamics of literature. I particularly recommend chapters 1, 2, 6, and 7.