Ora Avni

Professor of French

Ora AvniOra Avni, B.A. Tel-Aviv University, Ph.D. Yale, faculty member at Yale from 1985-1991 and again from 1993, you spent your childhood in Tunis and your young adulthood in the Middle East before coming to America, and your interdisciplinary work on 19th and 20th century ranges, like your life, across languages and cultures, integrating literary, philosophical and historical concerns. Trained as a graduate student at Yale during the heyday of literary theory, your work, which ranges across poetry and narrative, shows the influence of the theoretical preoccupations that were a hallmark of that era. The title of your 1990 book, The Resistance of Reference: Linguistics, Philosophy and the Literary text is a good indication of your intellectual preoccupations—but at the same time demonstrates how in your intellectual career you defied categories and moved beyond them. In this important work you do not simply investigate and apply many different theories to literary works, you also demonstrate their intrinsic limitations in analyzing them—just as in writing on Elie Wiesel and the Shoah you demonstrate the limitations of psychoanalysis in wrestling with the evil of the past.

Whether writing on the 19th century poetic novel Les Chants de Maldor or the contemporary fiction of Patrick Modiano, or exploring the limitations of Holocaust literature in encapsulating the horrors of history, your work is notably dense and richly textured. Many would say the same about you as a person. Excellent teacher, who is engaging but never talks down, you have been known to be fearless, strong, and direct, speaking your mind to students, faculty and administrators alike. These qualities helped you lead and sustain Yale’s distinguished department of French in the late eighties and early nineties when you were its Chair.

In recent years, you have discovered a new passion: you have become an excellent mosaicist as well a passionate explicator and proponent of that craft. As you continue your career as a fine artist in a new form, your colleagues wish you Salut et Bonne Chance!

Tribute Editor: Penelope Laurans