Roman Katsman

Roman Katsman (born 1969) is an Israeli professor and researcher of Hebrew and Russian literature.

He is Full Professor of the Department of Literature of the Jewish People in Bar-Ilan University.

Katsman was born in Zhitomir (Ukraine) on November 26, 1969.

He has lived in Israel since 1990.

He earned his Ph.D. (cum laude) from Bar-Ilan University in 1999.

The title of his dissertation was "Mythopoesis: Theory, Method and Application in the Selected Works by Dostoevsky and Agnon."

Since 2000, Katsman has taught in the Department of Literature of the Jewish People in Bar-Ilan University.

(2002), is dedicated to developing a theory of mythopoesis, that is, how myth is created through the act of reading the literary text.

Myth is defined

(following Alexei Losev) as a miraculous history of personality given in words

(the miracle in this case being perceived as the realization of the personality's transcendental purpose in empirical history).

Based on Emmanuel Levinas' concept of revelation, a theory is proposed in which mythopoesis is seen as the personality's becoming towards its miracle in an ethical

face-to-face encounter with another personality.

A method for the study of literary mythopoesis is constructed on the foundation of this theory of mythopoesis.

This project continues in the direction of a theory of the literary figure as a mythopoeic personality.

A dialogue with the René Girard and Eric Gans anthropological-philosophical theories has been

developed, according to which a sign (in language and culture in general) is created in an originary scene of violence or prevention of violence towards a central personality (the victim), as a substitute for it.

In this research, Girard's and Gans' theory is complemented with a theory of mythopoesis, according to which the personality's transformation into a sign is accompanied by a simultaneous process whereby the sign is transformed into a personality (this is the process of myth-creation).

The two processes are treated as unified and

feeding each other within a complex dynamic system.

The system is then examined

in terms of chaos theory.

The discussion leads to the conclusion that the

figure's origination is a chaotic system, characterized also by features of an autopoetic (living) system, in terms of the Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela biological-cognitive theory.

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.

The works by Isaac Babel and Mandelstam are discussed in the context of multi-culturalism and

bi-national literature, leading to a new definition of Jewish-Russian

literature.

The book At the Other End of Gesture

(2008) is devoted to the problem of gestures (body language) in literature.

Based on recent advances in the modern science of gesture (Adam Kendon, David McNeill, Uri Hadar and others) a cognitive model is constructed of the

processing of gestures in the course of reading a literary text, and a method

is developed for an interdisciplinary study of the representation of gesture

in text, from poetic, cultural, anthropological and semiological aspects.

From 2014 to 2017, he served as the Head of the Department.

Katsman is married and has two children.

Katsman's first book, The Time of Cruel Miracles