Roman Katsman
The title of his dissertation was "Mythopoesis: Theory, Method and Application in the Selected Works by Dostoevsky and Agnon.
[2] Katsman's first book, The Time of Cruel Miracles (2002),[3] is dedicated to developing a theory of mythopoesis, that is, how myth is created through the act of reading the literary text.
[8] The book Poetics of Becoming (2005) is dedicated to this research, in which the theory of mythopoesis in its expanded form is examined through the works of Hebrew and Russian writers, including Agnon, Amos Oz, Meir Shalev, Orly Castel-Bloom, Etgar Keret, Dostoevsky, Mikhail Bulgakov, and Osip Mandelstam.
A series of discussions concerning the poetics of gesture in the writings of a number of modern Hebrew writers (Uri Nissan Gnessin, Isaac Dov Berkowitz, Yeshayahu Bershadsky, Gershon Shofman, Agnon, Jacob Steinberg, Etgar Keret, Judith Katzir, Meir Shalev, Aharon Appelfeld, Dorit Rabinyan) leads to far-reaching conclusions concerning their poetics and concerning the philosophy of gesture in modern culture.
[17] A Small Prophecy (2013)[18] is a theoretical and applied research of sincerity as rhetorical and cultural, lingual and anthropological category.
Two opposite conceptions of sincerity – as genuine self-expression and as artificial "theatrical" performance – are presented as not effective, especially in such complex cultural phenomena as S.Y.
The analysis brings out that Agnon's impossible, multi-intentional discourse on "the impossible" is aimed to scrutinize the realized possibilities of the historical existence of the Jewish community (on the scale from Buchach to the People of Israel), and to create new, not realized possibilities – the most mythic and true ones.
[21] Alternative history is not merely the definition of a historiographic method and of a subgenre of fantasy literature, but it is rather also a poetic and hermeneutical principle.
The mechanism of oscillation is identical at all of the levels and it consists of a return to the point of bifurcation in the past and a free choice of the new future.
Thus, analysis of an implicit historical and historiographical discourse, which underlies every work of literature, is carried out using a multi-layered method.
This research method is applied to Agnon's work in order to understand the complex philosophical-historical perceptions of the author.
The book Nostalgia for a Foreign Land (2016)[22] focuses on the last two and half decades of the history of Russian-language Israeli literature, and particularly on several novelists among many who immigrated to Israel with the "big wave" of repatriation in 1990s, and whose largest part of the works was written in Israel: Dina Rubina, Nekoda Singer, Elizaveta Mikhailichenko and Yuri Nesis, and Mikhail Yudson.
In spite of the evident differences in their styles, lingual and aesthetic visions, these five writers are united by the same essential feature: free play of the Jewish-Russian mentality, Jewish-Israeli identity, and Russian-Israeli culture.
Jointly with scholars Klavdia Smola and Maxim D. Shrayer, Katsman edited the anniversary volume of essays The Parallel Universes of David Shrayer-Petrov.
In English: The Parallel Universes of David Shrayer-Petrov: A Collection Published on the Occasion of the Writer's 85th Birthday, ed.
ISBN 9781644695265, 9781644695289 In Russian: Parallel'nye vselennye Davida Shraera-Petrova: Sbornik statei i materialov k 85-letiiu pisatelia, ed.
