The People of the Book and the Camera

Ofra Amihay is a lecturer of Hebrew language and literature in the Department of Religious Studies at UC Santa Barbara. She is the coeditor, with Lauren Walsh, of The Future of Text and Image: Collected Essays on Literary and Visual Conjunctures.

Fiction and reality, words and images: the concept of "imagetext" (Mitchell) is specified in this book as an inflection of the photographic imagination, in its ambivalent relationship to the novel. In the literature of "the people of the book", with its age-old struggle with imagery, this creative mode is especially relevant, innovative and creative. Reading images and seeing narrative: a most illuminating, sensory integration that Ofra Amihay conducts with mastery. This is the central task of the Humanities, and their unmissable contribution to cultural life.-- "Mieke Bal, ASCA, Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis" A vital contribution to our understanding of the ongoing conversation between literature and the visual arts, this book is additionally an essential contribution to the study of modern Hebrew literature. Informed by postcolonial and media theory, this cogent and persuasive study is a new standard work for anyone who is interested in the role literature and the arts play in the fraught landscape of today's Middle East.-- "Amir Eshel, Stanford University" In this original study of Israeli culture, Amihay lucidly unpacks complex works that interweave photographs, texts, and drawings. Her analyses propel Hebrew literature into dialogue with contemporary global immigrant literature and graphic narrative (W. G. Sebald, Teju Cole). Amihay makes a powerful claim for the political significance of photography in Hebrew writing, showing how word-image relations can offer critical interventions in Zionist-Israeli approaches to gender, race, memory, and trauma.-- "Maya Barzilai, The University of Michigan" The author skillfully navigates photographic theory, Zionist discourse, Israeli literary history, and Jewish literary history. The result is a highly illuminating work.-- "Sheila E. Jelen, University of Kentucky" This beautifully written study is brimming with extraordinary insights and deep scholarship illuminating the fascinating, often subversive nexus of image and language in modern Hebrew literature. Readers of Ronit Matalon, Michal Govrin, Yoel Hoffman, Ruth Almog, Anton Shammas, Sayed Kashua and others will surely rejoice in the brilliant new pathways that Ofra Amihay opens in this critically enthralling and multilayered book. Gracefully applying the revolutionary revelations of visual theorists (Barthes, Mitchell, Sontag, Agamben especially) to her endlessly thought-provoking literary case studies of the works of Jewish and Palestinian Israelis, The People of the Book and the Camera is a triumphantly observant, richly detailed and thoroughly invigorating study.-- "Ranen Omer-Sherman, University of Louisville"