Background
Alter, Robert Bernard was born on April 2, 1935 in New York City. Son of Harry and Tillie (Zimmmerman) Alter.
( In four elegant chapters, Robert Alter explains the pr...)
In four elegant chapters, Robert Alter explains the prismlike radiance created by the association of three modern masters, Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin, and Gershom Scholem. The volume pinpoints the intersections of these divergent witnesses to the modern condition of doubt, the no-man's-land between traditional religion and modern secular culture. Scholem, the devoted Zionist and master historian of Jewish mysticism, and Benjamin, the Marxist cultural critic, dedicated much of their thought and correspondence to Kafka, the explorer in fiction of radical alienation. Kafka's sense of spiritual complexities was an inspiration to both thinkers in their resistance to the murderous simplification of totalitarian ideology. In Necessary Angels Alter uncovers a moment when the future of modernism is revealed in its preoccupation with the past. The angel of the title is first Kafka's: on June 25, 1914, the writer recorded in his diary a dream vision of an angel that turned into the painted wooden figurehead of a ship. In 1940, at the end of his life, Walter Benjamin devoted the ninth of his Theses on the Philosophy of History to a meditation on an angel by the artist Paul Klee, first quoting a poem he had written on that painting. In Benjamin's vision, the figure from Klee becomes an angel of history, sucked into the future by the storm of progress, his face looking back to Eden. Benjamin bequeathed the Klee oil painting to Scholem; it hung in the living room of Scholem's home on Abarbanel Street in Jerusalem until 1989, when his widow placed it in the Israel Museum. Alter's focus on the epiphanic force of memory on these three great modernists shows with sometimes startling, sometimes prophetic clarity that a complete break with tradition is not essential to modernism. Necessary Angels itself continues the necessary discovery of the future in the past.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0674606639/?tag=2022091-20
( “For many serious readers,” Robert Alter writes in his ...)
“For many serious readers,” Robert Alter writes in his preface, “the novel still matters, and I have tried here to suggest some reasons why that should be so.” In his wide-ranging discussion, Alter examines the imitation of reality in fiction to find out why mimesis has become problematic yet continues to engage us deeply as readers. Alter explores very different sorts of novels, from the self-conscious artifices of Sterne and Nabokov to what seem to be more realistic texts, such as those of Dickens, Flaubert, John Fowles, and the early Norman Mailer. Attention is also given to such individual critics as Edmund Wilson and Alfred Kazin and to current critical schools. In Alter's essays, a particular book or movement or juxtaposition of writers provides the occasion for the exploration of a general intellectual issue. The scrutiny of well-chosen passages, the joining of images or themes or ideas, the associative and intuitive processes that lead to the right phrase and the right loop of syntax for the matter at hand-all these come together unexpectedly to illuminate both the text in question and the general issue. Recent discussions of mimesis in fiction generally proceed from a single thesis. By contrast, Motives for Fiction offers an empirical approach, attempting to define mimesis in its various guises by careful critical readings of a heterogeneous sampling of literary texts. Intelligent and good-humored, the book is also old-fashioned enough to wonder whether mimesis might not be a task or responsibility to which much contemporary fiction has not proved entirely adequate.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0674587626/?tag=2022091-20
(Since it was first published nearly three decades ago, Th...)
Since it was first published nearly three decades ago, The Art of Biblical Narrative has radically expanded the horizons of biblical scholarship by recasting the Bible as a work of literary art deserving studied criticism. Renowned critic and translator Robert Alter presents the Hebrew Bible as a cohesive literary work, one whose many authors used innovative devices such as parallelism, contrasti...
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00FKYGGFO/?tag=2022091-20
(After The Tradition is a collection of fifteen essays by ...)
After The Tradition is a collection of fifteen essays by Robert Alter, originally published in "Commentary", regarding Jewish identity and the meaning of tradition since the Holocaust.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000NOZLNE/?tag=2022091-20
( Since it was first published nearly three decades ago, ...)
Since it was first published nearly three decades ago, The Art of Biblical Narrative has radically expanded the horizons of biblical scholarship by recasting the Bible as a work of literary art deserving studied criticism. Renowned critic and translator Robert Alter presents the Hebrew Bible as a cohesive literary work, one whose many authors used innovative devices such as parallelism, contrastive dialogue, and narrative tempo to tell one of the most revolutionary stories of human history: the revelation of a single god.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0465022553/?tag=2022091-20
(A distinguished critic rescues literature from the ivory ...)
A distinguished critic rescues literature from the ivory tower and reestablishes reading as a personal source of complex pleasure and insight.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0671706276/?tag=2022091-20
( “A book that ought to be placed in the hands of any per...)
“A book that ought to be placed in the hands of any person who shows the slightest interest in serious reading or in hearing a good, practical defense of high culture.” ―Wall Street Journal From one of our premier literary scholars, here is a learned and witty introduction to the “sheer vitality of literature and the satisfactions of a close, informed engagement with it” (New York Times). Robert Alter’s illumination of the unique power of reading literature is especially valuable at a time when we are surrounded by electronic texts that distract more than engage and when the special claims of literature are disparaged by the high priests of literary theory. Alter explores the strategies that distinguish literature―the resources of style, the dynamics of allusion, the formal design of structure, the play of perspective in narrative. He draws on copious examples from the great works of literary art―from the Book of Genesis to Shakespeare, Conrad, and Nabokov―to illustrate his analysis of what makes reading a source of complex pleasure and insight.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0393314995/?tag=2022091-20
( Three decades ago, renowned literary expert Robert Alte...)
Three decades ago, renowned literary expert Robert Alter radically expanded the horizons of biblical scholarship by recasting the Bible as not only a human creation but a work of literary art deserving studied criticism. In The Art of Biblical Poetry, his companion to the seminal The Art of Biblical Narrative, Alter takes his analysis beyond narrative craft to investigate the use of Hebrew poetry in the Bible. Updated with a new preface, myriad revisions, and passages from Alter's own critically acclaimed biblical translations, The Art of Biblical Poetry is an indispensable tool for understanding the Bible and its poetry.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0465022561/?tag=2022091-20
(The Bible is one of the world's great literary masterpiec...)
The Bible is one of the world's great literary masterpieces and, increasingly, literary scholars as well as general readers have enthusiastically joined the ranks of the religious orthodox in reading it. Robert Alter, who has long been in the vanguard of this movement, reflects on the paradoxes inherent in considering this great religious work as literature. This book builds on, and in some cases takes issues with, the new wave of literary and bibilical studies to reexamine the elusive, endlessly fascinating texts that have nourished our culture for millenia. While most other books, including Alter's own earlier work, have been devoted to an analysis of the formal poetry and narrative properties of biblical literature, in this book Alter steps back from the analytical catagories to reflect on the general nature of biblical literature. How is one to account for the presence of an impulse as playful and as potentially subversive as literary creation in a body of texts so dedicated to religious purposes? What is the relation between literary imagination and religious values in the Bible? In what ways is the bible distinctive as a body of literature. Are there lines of continuity between biblical literature and literature written later and elsewhere? In grappling with these questions, Alter draws on specific examples to make the theoretical issues concrete and intelligible.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0465092551/?tag=2022091-20
(A distinguished critic rescues literature from the ivory ...)
A distinguished critic rescues literature from the ivory tower and reestablishes reading as a personal source of complex pleasure and insight.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/067162783X/?tag=2022091-20
(Investigates the mode and effect of Hebrew poetry in the ...)
Investigates the mode and effect of Hebrew poetry in the Bible. This title presents three major concepts in biblical poetry (parallelism; narrative vs delineation; and, intensification), delving into an illuminating textual analysis using many examples from the Bible.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00FKYXS8C/?tag=2022091-20
(In Imagined Cities, Robert Alter traces the arc of litera...)
In Imagined Cities, Robert Alter traces the arc of literary development triggered by the runaway growth of urban centers from the early nineteenth century through the first two decades of the twentieth. As new technologies and arrangements of public and private space changed the ways people experienced time and space, the urban panorama became less coherent-a metropolis defying traditional representation and definition, a vast jumble of shifting fragments and glimpses-and writers were compelled to create new methods for conveying the experience of the city. In a series of subtle and convincing interpretations of novels by Flaubert, Dickens, Bely, Woolf, Joyce, and Kafka, Alter reveals the ways the city entered the literary imagination. He shows how writers of diverse imaginative temperaments developed innovative techniques to represent shifts in modern consciousness. Writers sought more than a journalistic representation of city living, he argues, and to convey meaningfully the reality of the metropolis, the city had to be re-created or reimagined. His book probes the literary response to changing realities of the period and contributes significantly to our understanding of the history of the Western imagination.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/030017554X/?tag=2022091-20
(This text, with a new preface by its author, charts the c...)
This text, with a new preface by its author, charts the conflict between the proponents of popular culture on the one hand and the defenders of high art on the other. Robert Alter argues cogently for great literature, and using examples from world literature, illustrates the pleasures of reading.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00FDVLS34/?tag=2022091-20
Comparative literature educator and critic
Alter, Robert Bernard was born on April 2, 1935 in New York City. Son of Harry and Tillie (Zimmmerman) Alter.
Bachelor, Columbia University, 1957. Master of Arts, Harvard University, 1958. Doctor of Philosophy, Harvard University, 1962.
Doctor of Humane Letters (honorary), Hebrew Union College, 1985.
Instructor, then assistant Professor of English, Columbia University, 1962-1966; member of faculty, University of California-Berkeley, since 1967; professor Hebrew and comparative literature, University of California-Berkeley, since 1969; department chairman comparative literature, University of California-Berkeley, 1970-1973, 88-89; class of 1937 professor, University of California-Berkeley, since 1989; columnist, Commentary magazine, 1965-1973; contributing editor, Commentary magazine, 1973-1986.
(Since it was first published nearly three decades ago, Th...)
( Since it was first published nearly three decades ago, ...)
( Three decades ago, renowned literary expert Robert Alte...)
(The Bible is one of the world's great literary masterpiec...)
(In Imagined Cities, Robert Alter traces the arc of litera...)
(After The Tradition is a collection of fifteen essays by ...)
( In four elegant chapters, Robert Alter explains the pr...)
( “A book that ought to be placed in the hands of any per...)
(This text, with a new preface by its author, charts the c...)
( “For many serious readers,” Robert Alter writes in his ...)
(A distinguished critic rescues literature from the ivory ...)
(A distinguished critic rescues literature from the ivory ...)
(Investigates the mode and effect of Hebrew poetry in the ...)
(The Art Of Biblical Narrative PaperbackRobert Alter (Author))
(The Art Of Biblical Poetry PaperbackRobert Alter (Author))
(Will be shipped from US. Used books may not include compa...)
(Book by Alter, Robert)
(Brand New. Will be shipped from US.)
(Brand New. Will be shipped from US.)
(Brand New. Will be shipped from US.)
(New copy. Fast shipping. Will be shipped from US.)
Fellow American Academy Arts and Sciences. Member American Comparative Literature Association, Council of Scholars of Library of Congress, Association Literature Scholars and Critics (president 1996-1997).
Married Judith Berkenbilt, June 4, 1961 (divorced 1973). Children: Miriam, Dan. Married Carol Cosman, June 17, 1973.
Children: Gabriel, Micha.