'Bad Snow-Whites' Israeli women's poetry of the 1960's: The poetics of Dalia Hertz, Yona Wallach, and Rina Shani.

摘要

This study explores revolutionary aspects of Israeli women's poetry of the 1960's, through the poetics of Dalia Hertz, Yona Wallach, and Rina Shani. During the 1960's, especially with the appearance of Dalia Hertz and subsequently Yona Wallach, the entire concept of women's poetry, its poetic norms and principles, was challenged and redefined. These women poets were determined to give voice to authentic female experiences, feminist notions and critical ideas, through rhetorical strategies, themes, and language that had not previously been part of the female discourse in Hebrew poetry.; The poetic changes are examined as part of a poetic-historic move that had started in the 1950's with Nathan Zach's poetic revolution against Alterman and his generation. The generation of the 1960's wished to replace rigid modernist norms and to allow a pluralistic poetry that expresses different voices and discourses. Hertz, Wallach, and Shani are read here in both their historic and gender contexts.; Unlike the first half of the twentieth century, when women's Hebrew poetry dealt mostly with love, agony, motherhood, and romance, Hertz, Wallach, and Shani introduced themes that had been taboo, and rejected others that had traditionally defined women's poetry. They rejected traditional concepts of love and motherhood, but dealt with homoeroticism, authentic sensations, and psychic conditions. Linguistically, they employed a variety of linguistic registers, from the high literary to the provocative vernacular. Their poetry was linguistically complex and sophisticated and rejected the traditional identification of femininity with simplicity or clarity. By breaking syntactic rules, deviating from grammatical norms, and creating neologisms or idiosyncratic collocations, these women changed, challenged, and redefined the boundaries of the existing poetic system. Through their language, thematics, rhetoric, and feminist approach, these poets introduced a new female conscious. In order to do so, however, Hebrew poetry had to go through a poetic transformation, in which modernist conventions that dominated prior to the sixties would be rejected and replaced.