Invention of Dialogue in the Bible

Robert Alter is Professor in the Graduate School and Emeritus Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the University of California at Berkeley, where he has taught since 1967. He has twice been a Guggenheim Fellow and has also been a Senior Fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities, a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Jerusalem, and an Old Dominion Fellow at Princeton University. He has written widely on the European novel from the eighteenth century to the present, on contemporary American fiction, on modern Hebrew literature, and on literary aspects of the Bible. His twenty-four published books include two prize-winning volumes on biblical narrative and poetry.

"A fascinating, erudite, accessible work on literary dialogue, in both the Bible, as well as classic novels. After reading it, I found myself thinking differently not only about these texts, but about dialogue in my own writing—a gift for which I remain deeply grateful."—Daniel Mason, author of North Woods"With the psychological insight and passion for vivid detail we've come to expect from Robert Alter, this new book shows how biblical writers, for the first time in literary history, exploited the power of realistic dialogue, probing the secret of a narrative achievement as subtle and complex as that of the greatest modern novelists."—Herbert Marks, editor of The English Bible, King James Version"Erudite, eloquent, and refreshingly direct, The Invention of Dialogue examines the innovative use of dialogue in Hebrew biblical narratives. . . . Shining through this book is Alter's profound love of biblical literature and his incomparable gifts as a biblical interpreter."—Timothy Beal, Case Western Reserve University"In the course of proving his thesis, Alter offers reading after brilliant reading of Biblical passages. Some of them illustrate more than one way in which dialogues work, and so he comes back to these passages—for example, Jacob's opening conversation with Esau—time and again. These readings are worth the price of admission even apart from the book's general thesis. . . . This book will change the way in which Biblical stories are read."—Gary Saul Morson, Northwestern University

• 1. From Talking to Dialogue2. Dialogue and Character3. Contrastive Dialogue4. Bending the Language and Surprises in Speech5. ComparisonsIndex