About

Karen Grumberg is the Stiles Professor of Humanities and Comparative Literature at the University of Texas at Austin. Her academic expertise encompasses the Gothic, modern Hebrew literature, and 19th- and 20th-century American literature. She is affiliated with the College of Liberal Arts and is involved in the MES & MELC GSC programs. Her work focuses on comparative literature, exploring themes across different literary traditions and historical periods. As a professor, she contributes to the understanding of literary genres and cultural narratives, emphasizing the intersections of literature, history, and cultural studies. Her research and teaching aim to deepen insights into the literary and cultural developments within her areas of specialization.

Research topics

• Philosophy
• Art
• History
• Literature
• Political Science
• Theology
• Law
• Art history
• Linguistics
• Classics
• Psychology

Selected publications

• 29. Queer Gothic Narratives of Palestine in Alon Hilu’s The House of Rajani and Ayman Sikseck’s Tishrin

  Edinburgh University Press eBooks · 2023-07-19

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• The greatness of smallness: Amos Oz, Sherwood Anderson, and the American presence in Hebrew Literature

  2023-01-09

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• Introduction:

  University of Wales Press eBooks · 2022-12-15

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• All the Realities and All the Illusions

  Studies in American Jewish Literature (1981-) · 2021-02-01

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  ABSTRACT This review essay considers Adam Newton’s book Jewish Studies as Counterlife through the lens of modern Hebrew and comparative literary studies. I begin by reflecting on Newton’s articulation of the problems plaguing Jewish studies in the American academy, and on his proposal of a “Jewish Studies to come”–a vision based on relationality, interruption, and sharing that moves beyond disciplines, interdisciplinarity, and the academy itself. Bringing these ideas into conversation with my own experience as a scholar of Hebrew and comparative literature, I outline my ambivalence regarding my positionality within Jewish studies, a field that is by definition concerned with Jewish and Judaic matters and that has privileged history and religious studies over literature and culture. The expansion of the field and the permeability of its boundaries, however, have created the conditions for my own active participation in its institutions, suggesting that Newton’s vision has already started to take shape. Newton’s book, more a manifesto then a report, does the crucial work of theorizing these shifts and their potential not only for Jewish studies but also, critically, for the humanities more broadly. In posing a new set of questions and bypassing the conventional concerns undergirding attempts to define, understand, and situate Jewish studies, Newton invites “the uncontainable” into Jewish studies and Jewish studies–in all its uncontainability–more fully into the humanities. Jewish Studies as Counterlife makes a radical, viable, and imaginative case for inclusion within Jewish studies as well as of Jewish studies.

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• Hebrew Gothic: History and the Poetics of Persecution

  2021-12-08 · 5 citations

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  "Sinister tales written since the early 20th century by the foremost Hebrew authors, including S. Y. Agnon, Leah Goldberg, and Amos Oz, reveal a darkness at the foundation of Hebrew culture. The ghosts of a murdered Talmud scholar and his kidnapped bride rise from their graves for a nocturnal dance of death; a girl hidden by a count in a secret chamber of an Eastern European castle emerges to find that, unbeknownst to her, World War II ended years earlier; a man recounts the act of incest that would shape a trajectory of personal and national history. Reading these works together with central British and American gothic texts, Karen Grumberg illustrates that modern Hebrew literature has regularly appropriated key gothic ideas to help conceptualize the Jewish relationship to the past and, more broadly, to time. She explores why these authors were drawn to the gothic, originally a European mode associated with antisemitism, and how they use it to challenge assumptions about power and powerlessness, vulnerability and violence, and to shape modern Hebrew culture. Grumberg provides an original perspective on Hebrew literary engagement with history and sheds new light on the tensions that continue to characterize contemporary Israeli cultural and political rhetoric"--

• Introduction: Beyond Orientalism—Edgar Allan Poe and the Middle East

  Poe Studies · 2020

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Literature
  • History
  • Art history

  Introduction:Beyond Orientalism—Edgar Allan Poe and the Middle East Karen Grumberg (bio) Edgar Allan Poe's writing travels well. Through Charles Baudelaire's French translations, Poe's works enthralled Parisian readers and proceeded to make their way across Europe and beyond.1 Poe's transformation into "world author" was taking place at almost the same time as his establishment as a US author. Evocative analyses of Poe's translation into Icelandic, Japanese, Arabic, Spanish, and many more languages complement the exposés of his influence on authors around the globe. Poe has been translated and retranslated, read and reread, adapted and imitated, offering a particularly rich illustration of the transnational and translinguistic circulation that David Damrosch emphasizes in his characterization of world literature.2 The scholarly interest in Poe as a participant in a global literary network is readily evident in the proliferation of recent studies such as Poe Abroad, "Cosmopolitan Poe," Poe's Pervasive Influence, Translated Poe, and "Poe and his Global Advocates. "3 While scholars have long been concerned with Poe's influence on specific authors and literary traditions—for example, on French literature via Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarmé, or Paul Valéry; on Argentine literature via Horacio Quiroga, Jorge Luis Borges, or Julio Cortázar; or on Japanese literature via Edogawa Rampo or Ryūnosuke Akutagawa—the studies cited above indicate a shift in approach, reframing individual cases collectively as the basis of Poe's status as a world author. There is by now no doubt of Poe's foresight when he expressed in a letter to John Allan on December 22, 1828: "the world shall be my theatre" (Letters, 1:17). The global stagings of Poe's works tell their own distinctive stories, which, taken together, link Poe to the discourse on world literature. Another body of scholarship that considers Poe's interaction with the wider world focuses on his Orientalism. Poe's representation of themes and aesthetics associated with Central Asia and the Middle East has been read [End Page 3] alongside those of his contemporaries in the United States and Europe.4 Like them, Poe drew from widespread stereotypes, not to engage meaningfully with the region as a home to people with distinctive, complex cultures, but rather to infuse his poetry and prose with an exotic, mysterious atmosphere. Decades before Edward Said published his seminal study on the subject, critics had already commented on the Orientalism of Poe's works (with some earlier critics betraying their own Orientalizing tendencies). There is no question that Poe's perception of "the East" furnished a treasure trove of objects and behaviors that would help stylize stories like "Ligeia" and poems like "Al Aaraaf." The question of Poe's Orientalism continues to provoke compelling avenues of inquiry and analysis that occasionally produce incompatible interpretations. Schueller, for instance, reads Poe's works, and specifically "Ligeia," as offering "a parodied Orientalist discourse [that] intersects with discourses on Southern nationalism and sexuality. "5 This reading of Poe's Orientalism as a politically strategic appropriation and revision contrasts with others that consider it political only by virtue of the disengagement from the real it seems to afford Poe. For example, Gruesser's reading of "Ligeia" critiques what it sees as Poe's unproblematized use of Orientalist tropes by applying Said's core ideas to the story: "'Ligeia,' like Orientalism, portrays the intellectual, if not the political, dangers of allowing a paper construct to take the place of that which actually exists. "6 In the critical imagination, Poe's employment of Orientalist tropes has been interpreted both in keeping with conventional Western Orientalism and as its subtle subversion. Poe's Orientalist representation of the Middle East, while significant, speaks to a single facet of his works' engagement with the region. What of the region's engagement with Poe? How did (and how do) readers, authors, and other producers and consumers of culture in the Middle East understand his poems and stories? What are the challenges and rewards of bringing Poe's works into contact with new linguistic spheres and diverse cultural contexts? How might such interactions affect our reading of Poe? These questions underpin this special feature on "Poe and the Middle...

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• "Dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before": Poe, Degeneration, and Revolution in the Hebrew Imagination

  Poe Studies · 2020

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  • Political Science
  • Literature
  • History

  "Dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before":Poe, Degeneration, and Revolution in the Hebrew Imagination Karen Grumberg (bio) In 1913, the Zionist Palestinian Hebrew periodical Ha-poel ha-tsa'ir (The young worker) published a six-part series entitled "Sifrut ḥolanit" (Degenerate literature), focused entirely on Edgar Allan Poe and his works.1 The essay series appeared in the Yishuv, the pre-state Jewish settlement, over a month and a half, several years before the establishment of the British Mandate for Palestine and a year before the publication of the first Hebrew translation of any work by Poe. A decade later, Ze'ev Jabotinsky, the fiery ideologue of Revisionist Zionism, translated Poe's "The Raven" in a version destined to become a classic of modern Hebrew translation. Jabotinsky's iconic translation, "Ha-orev," associated Poe, among his Hebrew readers, with the political right in the Yishuv and, later, in Israel. The fact that several Hebrew poets who engaged with Poe were aligned with Jabotinsky's politics only intensified this association. Poe's regular appearance in the twentieth-century Hebrew cultural landscape both confirms and challenges expectations. The Zionist conceptualization of the world seems discordant with and even antithetical to Poe's aesthetic and thematic preoccupations: one is about the future, while the other looks always to the threatening past; one is about bright sunshine, reason, and action, while the other is mired in darkness, the irrational, and fear; one is about the New Jew, while the other is preoccupied with old specters. As I have argued elsewhere, this opposition is not quite what it seems; still, Edgar Allan Poe, with his crumbling edifices, his live burials, and his melancholy maidens, did not immediately correlate to the worldview of early twentieth-century Zionism and the sophisticated, strategic Hebrew translation apparatus helping to shape this ideology, which had little interest in such gothic works.2 Yet Poe was translated several times over, a fact that likely has something so do with his primary [End Page 47] identification, in Hebrew literary criticism, with French Symbolism. In Hebrew scholarship, Poe has been referred to as an "exiled" author and has been contrasted to Walt Whitman, a "truly American" poet.3 Thinking of Poe as American, though, may help explain his enduring presence in the twentieth-century Hebrew political imagination. In this essay, I argue that Poe signifies a tense and surprising intersection of key concepts in early twentieth-century Zionist thought, namely degeneration and revolution. In the years preceding the rise of a more militant expansionist vision of the movement—what would come to be known as Revisionist Zionism—the left calls on Poe to illustrate the decadence and decay that threaten revolution. With the emergence of Revisionist Zionism, Poe is appropriated by the right to perform the opposite role, epitomizing the forward-looking revolutionary fervor integral to the success of Zionism. This article is concerned first and foremost with investigating how these two antagonistic types of Zionism found in Poe a substantive political interlocutor, yet engaged with him antithetically. I address Hebrew translations of Poe and Poe's influence on specific Hebrew authors and literary contexts only briefly. My focus, rather, is on the way readers subscribing to paradoxical perspectives of Hebrew political culture appropriated Poe's persona, as it was understood, and interpreted his aesthetics to support divergent visions for Zionism. I begin by providing an overview of Hebrew translations of Poe and Poe's influence on original Hebrew poetry. I then examine closely three sets of texts to work through the place of Poe in Hebrew culture: the "Degenerate literature" essay series in Ha-poel ha-tsa'ir; two later newspaper articles on Poe and Jabotinsky by critics on opposite ends of the Israeli political spectrum; and a 1926 essay by Jabotinsky, titled "Al Amerika" ("On America"). On one hand, Poe's works seem obviously dissonant with fundamental Zionist values; on the other, these works have attracted and influenced Hebrew translators and poets throughout the twentieth century, including several figures well-known for their right-wing nationalism. Poe's presence in Hebrew literary culture and in the political sensibility associated with militant Zionism owes much to Jabotinsky, the dominant...

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• Space in Modern Hebrew Literature

  2020-03-25

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  The complex relationship between space and modern Hebrew literature proceeds from key spatial paradigms of the Hebrew Bible: Egypt, the desert, and Zion. Over centuries, Jews dispersed around the globe used Hebrew to express different modes of spatial engagement: rabbis considered the places and placelessness of God; medieval Andalusian poets longed for Zion; communist Jews in Baghdad and Jewish polyglots in Odessa used Hebrew to narrate their relationship to places their families inhabited for generations; Israeli Jews and Israeli Palestinians, in an era when Hebrew is no longer the sole purview of Jews, share Hebrew to reflect on homeland and diaspora in poetry and prose. Though “space” is by no means a novel phenomenon, the “spatial turn” in the humanities and social sciences offered scholars of Hebrew culture conceptual and theoretical tools for addressing the diverse spatial configurations they encountered. The theorization of space and place in literature emphasized their active role in social relations and called for new conceptualizations of the construction and subversion of identities. Works by Gaston Bachelard, Michel de Certeau, Henri Lefebvre, Doreen Massey, Edward Said, Edward Soja, and Yi-Fu Tuan, among others, have undergirded investigations of space and place in modern Hebrew literature. Because most of the critical work on space in Hebrew literature addresses Hebrew texts from the twentieth century, this entry focuses on this period, though it also provides citations of scholarship analyzing biblical, rabbinic, Andalusian, and Haskalah texts. The citations mostly refer to literary texts but also include spatial analyses in cultural studies and history contexts. While many of the texts cited address the nation and territory or, alternatively, spatial paradigms that coalesce in resistance to the national, others investigate spatial paradigms in Hebrew that circumvent the national to consider fluid spatialities such as diaspora, migration, transnationalism, and travel, as well as historical spatial configurations that exist as memories, dreams, or specters. The preponderance of concrete investigations of specific places such as the city, the desert, and the kibbutz indicates the materiality of much of Hebrew literary spatiality. As the final section on modernity demonstrates, the spatial has opened fruitful avenues of inquiry within the existing historical discourse on Hebrew culture. There is, inevitably, some overlap in these categories: entries under The City, for example, might feel at home under Modernism and Place, while the line demarcating Borders and Beyond is appropriately penetrable, bleeding into Spatialities of Center and Margins. Finally, this entry should by no means be taken to represent all the scholarship on space in modern Hebrew literature, but rather to provide a sense of significant contributions and recent research.

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• The greatness of smallness: Amos Oz, Sherwood Anderson, and the American presence in Hebrew literature

  The Journal of Israeli History · 2020 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Literature
  • History
  • Classics

  This article offers a comparative reading of stories by Amos Oz and Sherwood Anderson to propose “smallness” – evoked by genre, setting, and literary devices – as a vital literary strategy structuring Oz’s works. Manifestations of smallness, fundamental to the twentieth-century American literary imagination, are indispensable in Oz’s stories. Paradoxically, both Oz’s literary modernism and his status as a “world author” can only be understood in the context of the small, the provincial, and the local that Anderson elevated to the status of great literature, suggesting that not only European literature but also (non-Jewish) American writing has influenced Hebrew literature

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• Translational Transactions: Introduction

  2019-04-10

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Frequent coauthors

• Corine Tachtiris

  1 shared