Jerusalem Conference on Narrative: November 27-30, 2005

I see that Narrative as a Way of Thinking, an International Symposium in Honor of Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, will be taking place November 27-30, 2005 at the Mt. Scopus campus of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

I mention this for two reasons.

First, I've read and am now re-reading Rimmon-Kenan's Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics, as some of you will recall. I have the 1983 version, but an updated version (2002) has more recently come into print. I like the book because I find it not solely a text to expand one's knowledge of literary theory but also a text that can guide the writer of fiction. I don't know if Rimmon-Kenan intended this latter use, but I've found that her analysis of fiction's structures can provide practical application for writing fiction because it breaks narrative down into units that one can work on separately prior to recombining them.

Not that I've tried this yet myself.

Second, I spent a year doing postdoctoral work as a Golda Meir Fellow at Hebrew University, albeit not in the Department of English -- though I've corresponded by email with Professor Sanford Budick, who generously sent me a copy of his Dividing Muse: Images of Sacred Disjunction in Milton's Poetry when I was looking into Milton's use of Jewish sources in Paradise Lost. As for my year in Jerusalem, I spent it working in Religious Studies with such scholars as David Satran and Michael Stone on research into the early relations between Christianity and Judaism, as reflected in religious texts from the first two or three centuries after Christ.

And my wife narrowly escaped being blown up by an Islamic Jihad terrorist bombing in the Mahaneh Yehudah Market on November 6, 1998.

Aside from these two personal reasons, I mention the symposium because it looks worth attending on its own merits. I can't make it, but perhaps next year in Jerusalem.