What We're Reading: 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. Yahav's research project is to identify an 18th-century interest in qualitative time, but her reading includes such 20th-century creations as the Gruffalo and a Sneetch or two. (More from Professor Yahav here.)


What are you reading, Professor Yahav?
The most intriguing book I read this year is Irene Tucker's The Moment of Racial Sight (Chicago UP 2012). I love it for two reasons: First, for how it brings together works of different genres and periods; it is a tour de force of intellectual bricolage, starting with Dr. Seuss's The Sneetches then moving back to Kant, and forward through Willkie Collins, Darwin, John Stuart Mill, to the HBO series The Wire. This is an unlikely mix, but scholarship that manages to make such surprising combinations work is the best kind in my opinion. I also love how this book asks questions about the most basic presumptions of a common way of thinking; rather than directly engaging current debates about race, it probes the very logic that supports some of our deeply held beliefs. Tucker notices that even as we all agree that race is a constructed category (which is to say arbitrary in the Saussurian sense), we all rely on its enabling instant legibility. That is, while race doesn't tell us anything essential about people, it supports immediate recognition of sameness and difference, a recognition we constantly use. Think of how easily stars can be put on and taken off Sneetches, at the same time that these arbitrary stars just as easily distinguish between two different groups of Sneetches. Tucker asks how and why we came to think of race as both visible by skin and cultural (not biological); her answer takes us on a fascinating trip from Kant's writings on anthropology and medicine, through character and plot construction in The Woman in White, Mill and photography, Darwin's Origin of Species, up to The Wire's depiction of the sociology and economics of Baltimore.
As for leisure reading . . . well, in the last few years I mostly get to do it for and with very short people with an even shorter attention span. How we all love the rhyme, rhythm, humor, and--of course--the "message" of The Gruffalo.
But I did manage, not too long ago, to read a novel which was neither for kids nor written in the 18th century: Chinghiz Aitmatov's The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years. I loved this novel's compassion--its nuanced and rich psychologies that represent human frailty and endurance. Aitmatov recounts the mid-20th-century history of Kazakhstan, along with Kazakh folklore, and Soviet domination. It is a place and time about which I know little and do not hold particular curiosities; and yet the subtle strokes with which the characters are drawn and the sympathy that radiates from the narration captivated me.