University of Florida Homepage

Avraham Balaban

Emeritus Professor of Hebrew
Ph.D., Tel Aviv University

Biography and Areas of Interest

I finished my PhD at Tel Aviv University in 1979. The topic of my dissertation was “Meaning, Rhetoric and Form in Natan Alterman’s Poetry,” which was prepared under the supervision of Prof. Dan Miron. In 1982 I received in Israel a prestigeous literary prize, “The Prime Minister Creativity Award,” for my two scholarly books and two books of poetry. Following this prize I was invited as a scholar and then a visiting professor to Harvard University in 1983. I served as an assistant professor of modern Hebrew literature at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor) from 1984 to 1989, then was invited to teach at UF, first as an associate professor and from 1991 as a full professor.

My main publications deal with Hebrew fiction of the second half of the twentieth century (two volumes of reaserch on the fiction of Amos Oz, one on A.B. Yehoshua, one of the female writer Amalia Kahana-Carmon, and a panoramic examination of “postmodernist” trends in Hebrew fiction of the late 1980s and the early 1990s).

Selected Publications

  • 2000. Shivah (Mourning) (a literary memoir), was published in Hebrew and, in 2004, in English.
  • 1995. A Different Wave in Israeli Fiction, Postmodern Israeli Fiction. Keter, Jerusalem (in Hebrew).
  • 1993. Between God and Beast: An Examination of the Fiction of Amos Oz. Penn State University Press, University Park.

Courses Taught

  • Images of Women in Modern Hebrew Literature
  • Modern Hebrew Poetry (first semester: From the Beginning of the Twentieth Century to the Early 1940s; second semester: From the Mid ’40s to the Early 1990s)
  • The Fiction of Amos Oz
  • Hebrew Literature in Translation
  • Prosody
  • The Fiction of S-y Agnon
  • Postmodernist Hebrew Fiction
  • From the Fiction of the 1948 Generation to the Fiction of the “New Wave” (the Early 1960s)