Yael Segalovitz
Yael Segalovitz is a scholar of comparative literature working across English, Hebrew, and Portuguese. Her work engages modern and contemporary literature, theories of reading and translation, and psychoanalysis, with particular attention to object relations theory, autotheory, and the transnational legacies of close reading. She teaches courses on relational psychoanalysis and literature, Hebrew modernism and translation studies, catastrophe and modernity, and the history of the method wars.
Her most recent monograph, How Close Reading Made Us: The Transnational Legacies of New Criticism (SUNY Press, 2024), traces the global circulation of New Critical close reading from the United States to Brazil and Israel, and this practice's role in shaping the modernist work of writers such as William Faulkner, Clarice Lispector, João Guimarães Rosa, A. B. Yehoshua, and Yehuda Amichai. Her current projects pursue two distinct lines of inquiry: one on the affinities between object relations traditions of psychoanalytic self-writing and contemporary American autotheory, and another on the representation and theorization of sleep in Hebrew literature. She is also the co-creator and host of Psychoanaliterature, a podcast on psychoanalysis and literature now entering its second season.
Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/43xctmwr1PIFgqcJiMrijT
Website: https://www.yaelsegalovitz.com/
Selected Publications
Book
- How Close Reading Made Us: The Transnational Legacies of New Criticism. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2024.
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Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles and Review Essays
- “‘Being Asleep in Broad Daylight’: The Gender of Attentive Reading in Woolf and Lispector.” Poetics Today, special issue on “Attention and Literature,” forthcoming 2026.
- “Close Reading and the Making of Subjects.” MLN (Comparative Literature issue), omnibus review essay, forthcoming 2026.
- “Cisterhood: On Gender and Sibling Relations in Shimon Adaf and Dror Burstein.” Kri’ot Isra’eliot, special issue on “Familism,” 2025. [Hebrew]
- “Close Reading Beyond the Anglophone Orbit.” symplokē 32 (2024).
- “Psychoanaliterature: Autotheory and the Intersubjective Turn in Are You My Mother? and The Argonauts.” Textual Practice (2023).
- “‘The Music of Prose Takes Place in Silence’: Sound, Fury, and Faulkner’s Negative Audition.” Modern Fiction Studies 69.3 (2023): 417–443.
- Yael Segalovitz and Alex Brostoff. “When Enough Isn’t Enough: Sufficiency and Excess as Narrative Enoughing.” Dibur Literary Journal, special issue on “Idleness,” 15 (2023): 79–95.
- “‘That Listening Mien’: Queer and Psychoanalytic Intersubjectivity in Sedgwick’s Autotheory.” American Book Review 43.2 (2022).
- “Queering Identity Politics in Shimon Adaf’s Aviva-No.” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 22.1 (2020).
- “The Ghosts of New Criticism: Brooks, Faulkner, and the Politics of Close Reading.” OT: A Journal of Literary Criticism and Theory9 (2020): 43–76. [Hebrew]
- “William Faulkner, Cleanth Brooks, and the Living-Dead Reader of New Critical Theory.” Arizona Quarterly 75.1 (2019).
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Chapters in Edited Volumes
- “Psychoanalysis and Autotheory: The Relational Impulse.” In The Cambridge Companion to Autofiction, ed. Ralph Clare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2026.
- “‘My Error Is My Mirror’: Clarice Lispector’s Jewish Rhetoric of Mistakes.” In After Clarice, eds. Adriana X. Jacobs and Claire Williams. Cambridge: Legenda, 2022.
- “A Leap of Faith into Moses: Freud’s Invitation to Evenly Suspended Attention.” In Freud and Monotheism, eds. Karen Feldman and Gilad Sharvit. New York: Fordham University Press, 2018.
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Selected Translations
- Clarice Lispector, The Via Crucis of the Body. Trans. from Portuguese to Hebrew. Tel Aviv: Ha-Kibbutz ha-Me’uchad / Sifriat Po’alim, 2016.
- Shimon Adaf, Aviva-No. Trans. from Hebrew to English. Farmington, ME: Alice James Books, 2019 (Finalist for Best Translated Book Award [BTBA]; Editor’s Pick, World Literature Today).
- Dahlia Ravikovitch, Death in the Family. Trans. from Hebrew to English. In progress.
