Spring e-Quarterly Out Now

What is our new Assistant Professor Amit Yahav reading (besides the 18th century)? What new books are out from faculty, students, and alums? How is English participating in Northrop Auditorium's Grand Reopening? Find out in the new issue of our alumnae/i newsletter, e-Quarterly.

5 X Friday: Assistant Professor Amit Yahav

Assistant Professor Amit Yahav joined the English faculty this spring semester, after teaching at the University of Haifa and Johns Hopkins. A scholar of 18th-century literature, she graduated from Tel-Aviv University and earned her PhD in English Literature at Johns Hopkins University. When she's not immersed in the 18th century, she can be found reading picture books to "very short people with an even shorter attention span"--and also checking out contemporary fiction (she recommends Chinghiz Aitmatov's The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years). Read more to find out about her current research and what she misses about her hometown, Tel Aviv.


1. Could you briefly describe your current research focus?
I'm writing a book on duration in 18th-century novels and culture. The 18th century is well known for having developed abstract, disciplinary, mechanical, quantitative time--the paradigm of time is money, punctuality, order; or the notion that time is not much more than its conventional, abstract, notations. And yet the 18th century is also the age of sensibility, a culture that highlights sensing, feeling, subjectivity. I'm interested in the temporal conceptions developed by writers of sensibility to explain durations that are intensely personal, or that seem to us to have special qualities that clocks and calendars cannot get at. Philosophers of the 20th century have called such durations qualitative or experiential. My research has led me to think that 18th-century novelists and philosophers do a great job of defining such qualitative time, and of thinking up ways for representing it--how it can be abstracted into writing and print while maintaining its experiential quality. Moreover, 18th-century writers of sensibility explore qualitative time in ways that not only anticipate 20th-century accounts, but also significantly differ from these more recent discussions.
 
2. What led you to this research topic? Was there a certain class, workshop, conference, or mentor?
I had a good friend who insisted that he has his own time, which is different from my time. I didn't believe him. I thought that clocks and schedules were the only meaningful way of thinking about duration. We argued about it for years until he convinced me, and then "my time" became a fascinating intellectual problem. What can a duration be if it cannot be measured chronometrically? How can we talk about it, share it, coordinate it? At this point I started seeing non-chronometric time and special qualitative durations everywhere in the books I was reading for work. The most evocative scenes in Defoe's Moll Flanders involve difficulties of coordinating desires in time; Richardson calls his signature novelistic technique "writing to the moment" (rather than to the minute, hour, or second), Tristram Shandy notoriously cannot match the schedules of representation with the durations of experience, Ann Radcliffe arrests her plots to a standstill thus dilating the duration of our reading with lengthy accounts of the aesthetic pleasures of her heroines, etc.
 
3. What is your favorite work to teach?
My all-time favorite is Robinson Crusoe. I haven't yet met the student--or for that matter any reader--who didn't connect to this novel in some way. You can do with it what Crusoe does with his bible--randomly open the book and tease out meaningfulness from any passage. It is not simply that Crusoe yields itself to many different approaches--liberal, Marxist, psychological, post-colonial, formalist, linguistic. The novel, in and of itself, theorizes to some extent all these perspectives, so that you can learn from it key principles without prior knowledge of the theories. You need not have read Marx to notice how Defoe values production and use; you need not have read Locke to understand what is at stake for Defoe in individualism and rationality; or Freud to see how he explores analysis as the salutary path from despondency to well-being, or Coetzee to notice both the appeal and the implausibility of the imperialist masculine prototype. So it's fun to teach because students can do a lot with it on their own, as well as relatively easily learn to see dimensions beyond their immediate interests and existing knowledge.
 
4. Where did you grow up? Is there anything--food, geography, feeling--you miss?
I grew up in Israel, in the Tel Aviv area. Since arriving in Minneapolis I miss the outdoors--walking or biking everywhere, picnicking or reading in the park or on the beach, sitting outside in cafes. I'm told that Minneapolis is a great place to do all these things once the snow melts. We're eagerly awaiting spring....
 
5. What are you most excited about in joining the English faculty at Minnesota?
The intellectual community. There are many colleagues in the department and in the college whose work I admire, PhD students who study the 18th century, reading groups in my period and in theory, programs and institutes that support research and scholarly exchange. I'm sure these opportunities will significantly impact my research.