The Invention of Dialogue in the Bible

Robert Alter is Professor in the Graduate School and Emeritus Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the University of California at Berkeley, where he has taught since 1967. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the Council of Scholars of the Library of Congress, and is past president of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics. He has twice been a Guggenheim Fellow, has been a Senior Fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities, a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Jerusalem, and Old Dominion Fellow at Princeton University. He has written widely on the European novel from the eighteenth century to the present, on contemporary American fiction, on modern Hebrew literature, and on literary aspects of the Bible. His twenty-four published books include two prize-winning volumes on biblical narrative and poetry. Among his publications over the past twenty-five years are Necessary Angels: Tradition and Modernity in Kafka, Benjamin, and Scholem (1991), The David Story: A Translation with Commentary of 1 and 2 Samuel (1999), Imagined Cites (2005), The Book of Psalms: A Translation with Commentary (2007), and Pen of Iron: American Prose and the King James Bible (2010).

1. From Talking to Dialogue 2. Dialogue and Character 3. Contrastive Dialogue 4. Bending the Language and Surprises in Speech 5. Comparisons Index

"Erudite, eloquent, and refreshingly direct, The Invention of Dialogue examines the innovative use of dialogue in Hebrew biblical narratives. . . . Shining through this book is Alter's profound love of biblical literature and his incomparable gifts as a biblical interpreter."-Timothy Beal, Case Western Reserve University "In the course of proving his thesis, Alter offers reading after brilliant reading of Biblical passages. Some of them illustrate more than one way in which dialogues work, and so he comes back to these passages - for example, Jacob's opening conversation with Esau - time and again. These readings are worth the price of admission even apart from the book's general thesis. . . . This book will change the way in which Biblical stories are read."-Gary Saul Morson, Northwestern University