Microsoft Word 05 descriptions doc

Itamar Even-Zohar
, who became aware of the 
Russian texts as a student of Benjamin Harshav at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem 
and started to read them while studying in Copenhagen (see Even-Zohar 2008b; the 
networks of European scholarship are complex) and working on his doctoral 
dissertation. Even-Zohar has generally been concerned with the systemic descriptions of 
the ways cultures develop, and he explicitly follows the insights of Tynyanov, Jakobson 
and Eikhenbaum in studying cultural phenomena as systems, with their own principles 
and laws that await discovery. Rather than focus on literary systems in isolation, Even-
Zohar has sought to see cultures as “
polysystems
,” roughly as large, heterogeneous and 
complex systems (such as “Israeli culture,” “French culture”) within which there are 
smaller systems like literature, language, law, architecture, family life, and so on (hence 
the “poly,” meaning “many”). These smaller systems may also be complex and 
dynamic, warranting the “poly” prefix as well.
In his detached view of cultural systems, Even-Zohar has remained faithful to 
the tradition of scientific modeling and to the multiple strands of the European tradition, 
as was shown in his doctoral thesis on translation. Like the structuralists in Prague and 
Bratislava, he has worked from within a “minor” culture (Hebrew), and his interest in 
the pre-Israeli phases of Hebrew literature has led him to develop a view of it as a 
multiple-components system (a polysystem). Even-Zohar founded a section for 
Translation Studies at Tel Aviv University and was at the origin of what would become 
the “Tel Aviv School” of Translation Studies, which includes 
Gideon Toury
(whose 
PhD was supervised by Even-Zohar), Rakefet Sela-Sheffy and Gisèle Sapiro. This 
strand thus leads more or less directly to the coining of the term “Descriptive 
Translation Studies.”