Lisa Block de Behar


Lisa Block de Behar is an Uruguayan professor of Linguistics and researcher in Literary Theory, Comparative Literature and Communication media.
She holds a PhD from École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris where she wrote a thesis about the Rhetoric of Silence. She was the director at the School of Communication, Universidad de la República, Uruguay, and professor of Semiotics and Theory of interpretation at the same Institution. She taught Linguistics and Literary Theory at the Instituto de Profesores Artigas. Currently she is professor of Analysis of Communication at the Facultad de Información y Comunicación, Universidad de la República.
Her dissertation was published in Mexico titled Una retórica del silencio and won the Xavier Villaurrutia Award in 1984. She has been visiting professor and lectured on semiotics, linguistics, literary theory, comparative literature, hermeneutics on different subjects at North-American, European, Latin-American an Israeli Universities. She was awarded two times the Fulbright Commission scholarship, was a fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and of the Institute for Advanced Studies at Bloomington University, Indiana.
Her most recent research is concerned with a poetics of disappearance, in relation to space and writing, a rhetoric of discursive negativity and how hermeneutics imagines literality. Block de Behar observes the transformation of the connection between showing and telling and the uncertainties that technology introduces in literary discourse and daily communication. The incidences of Jewish culture and thought are very present in Block de Behar's research.
She is the author and editor of books on Louis Auguste Blanqui's cosmological phantasmagoria as well as on Jorge Luis Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Haroldo de Campos, Felisberto Hernández, Jules Laforgue, Carlos Real de Azúa and Emir Rodríguez Monegal.
In 2002 she received the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung "Prize Research Award" and in 2011 she was nominated Emeritus Professor of Spanish, Instituto de Profesores Artigas Montevideo, Uruguay, where she herself was a student and taught as professor.
In 2017 she was awarded Doctor Honoris Causa by the Universidad de la República, Uruguay.
DIGITAL LIBRARIES
WIth the collaboration of colleagues and graduate students she created and is developing different digital libraries at the site :

Editions, forewords and translations