Shattered Vessels, livre ebook

The first book-length study of the Israeli novelist David Shahar.

The first book-length study of the Israeli novelist David Shahar.

David Shahar (1926–1997), author of the seven-novel sequence The Palace of Shattered Vessels, occupies an ambiguous position in the Israeli literary canon. Often compared to Proust, Shahar produced a body of work that offers a fascinating poetic and ideological alternative to the dominant models of Amos Oz and A. B. Yehoshua. This book, the first full-length study of this fascinating author, takes a fresh look at the uniqueness of his literary achievement in both poetic and ideological terms. In addition to situating Shahar within the European literary tradition, the book reads Shahar's representation of Jerusalem in his multi-volume novel as a "heterotopia"-an actual space where society's unconscious (what does not fit on its ideological map) is materially present-and argues for the relevance of Shahar's work to the critical discussion of the Arab question in Israeli culture.

Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Flirting with the Uncanny

Narrative Organization
Chronology
Identities
Uncanny Photo
2. The Eyes of a Woman in (and out of) Love: Creation, Painting, and Betrayal in Shahar's Fiction

"Of Shadows and the Image"
"Of Dreams"
"First Lesson"
His Majesty's Agent
Of Candles and Winds

3. Shahar's Jerusalem

Small World/Liminal Space
Space and Plot
Heterotopia
An Urban Idyll
4. Otherness, Identity, and Place

Fluid Identities and Violent Mobs
The Portrait of the Narrator as an Arab Chauffeur
Exchanging Clothes, Exchanging Places
Canaanite, Hebrew, Jew
A Cautionary Tale
5. Remembering Proust

Similes of Memory
Metaphor and Metonymy
Autobiographical Narration
Apprenticeship
Artists
Notes
Bibliography
Index