Signatures of Struggle , livre ebook

State University of New York Press - Oded Nir

Découvre YouScribe en t'inscrivant gratuitement

Je m'inscris

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

174 pages

English

Vous pourrez modifier la taille du texte de cet ouvrage

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

A propos
Informations
Extrait

Description

Signatures of Struggle offers a unique perspective on Israeli literature, bringing Marxist cultural critique to bear on a field from which it has hitherto been absent. Oded Nir moves beyond the dominant interpretive horizon of Israeli literary criticism: the relation of literature to national ideology. Rather than reproducing the usual narrative in which fiction resists the nation's goals, Nir demonstrates how, in each historical moment, literary engagement with national ideology is a means to think through social tensions or contradictions internal to Israeli society—to solve in imagination problems that threaten the social order. Focusing on moments of transformation, Nir argues that the 1950s crisis of realism was the result of the failure, rather than the success, of the collective transformative project of the haluzim, the settler vanguard of Zionism. In the 1980s, the postmodern turn expressed a crisis of social imagination, whose origin was the incorporation of Palestinians into the Israeli economy after the 1967 war. Finally, he shows that the ways in which history is imaginatively reworked in contemporary Israeli fiction can only be understood through the context of 1950s and 1980s literature. Authors analyzed include Yigal Mossinsohn, Nathan Shaham, Hanoch Bartov, Yehudit Hendel, Orly Castel-Bloom, Yehudit Katzir, David Grossman, Yehoshua Kenaz, and Batya Gur.
Acknowledgments

Introduction: Periodizing Israeli Literature

1. Prehistory: Zionist Hebrew Literary Realism, between Altneuland and Khirbet Khizeh

2. From Utopian Project to Utopian Compensation in 1950s Works by Yigal Mossinsohn and Nathan Shaham

3. Then as Farce: Naturalism and Disavowed Failure in 1950s Hebrew Novels by Hanoch Bartov and Yehudit Hendel

4. Is There Israeli Postmodern Literature? Orly Castel-Bloom, Yehudit Katzir, and the Vicissitudes of National Space-Time in the 1980s and 1990s

5. Disorientation and the Genres: David Grossman, Yehoshua Kenaz, and Batya Gur

6. Time in Hiding: Israeli Fiction and Neoliberalism

7. In Search of New Time: Renarrating Soldier, Pioneer, and the Tel Aviv Subject-to-Come

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

Middle East

Literary theory

Informations

Publié par	State University of New York Press
Date de parution	26 septembre 2018
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781438472454
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,1648€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Signatures of Struggle
SUNY SERIES IN C ONTEMPORARY J EWISH L ITERATURE AND C ULTURE

Ezra Cappell, editor
Dan Shiffman, College Bound: The Pursuit of Education in Jewish American Literature, 1896–1944
Eric J. Sundquist, editor, Writing in Witness: A Holocaust Reader
Oded Nir, Signatures of Struggle: The Figuration of Collectivity in Israeli Fiction
Signatures of Struggle
The Figuration of Collectivity in Israeli Fiction
ODED NIR
Cover art by iStock by Getty Images
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2018 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Nir, Oded, author.
Title: Signatures of struggle : the figuration of collectivity in Israeli fiction / Oded Nir.
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, 2018. | Series: SUNY series in contemporary Jewish literature and culture | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018000361 | ISBN 9781438472430 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438472454 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Politics in literature. | Nationalism in literature. | Israeli fiction—History and criticism. | Ideology and literature.
Classification: LCC PJ5030.P64 N57 2018 | DDC 892.43/609—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018000361
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
In memory of my mother, Ayala Nir
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Periodizing Israeli Literature
1 Prehistory: Zionist Hebrew Literary Realism, between Altneuland and Khirbet Khizeh
2 From Utopian Project to Utopian Compensation in 1950s Works by Yigal Mossinsohn and Nathan Shaham
3 Then as Farce: Naturalism and Disavowed Failure in 1950s Hebrew Novels by Hanoch Bartov and Yehudit Hendel
4 Is There Israeli Postmodern Literature? Orly Castel-Bloom, Yehudit Katzir, and the Vicissitudes of National Space-Time in the 1980s and 1990s
5 Disorientation and the Genres: David Grossman, Yehoshua Kenaz, and Batya Gur
6 Time in Hiding: Israeli Fiction and Neoliberalism
7 In Search of New Time: Renarrating Soldier, Pioneer, and the Tel Aviv Subject-to-Come
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
An earlier version of chapter 1 (“ Prehistory ”) was originally published in Journal of Modern Jewish Studies under the title “Literature at Work: Zionist Literary Realism between Utopia and Khirbet Khizeh .”
Most of chapter 7 (“ In Search for New Time ”) was originally published in Prooftexts under the title “On the Historical Imaginary of Contemporary Israeli Fiction, Or, Postmodernism’s Aftermath in Novels by Lilach Netanel and Yiftach Ashkenazi.”
Introduction
Periodizing Israeli Literature
One of the more nagging problems of writing a book in English about Israeli literature is a problem of audience: it is unclear whether one is writing for scholars of Israeli culture and literature, for people actually invested in Israel as a collective project, or for a larger circle of theoretically informed scholars. That this problem is symptomatic of a deeper problem of social mapping, or of having some stable mental representation of the way in which one’s activity is inserted into the world, should be obvious. Yet, so quick of a plunge into a generalized social condition would be too easy. Much more difficult is another valence of this problem: the fast crumbling of the humanities academia, its institutional form undergoing a process of neoliberalization that eliminates the tenured positions on which its previous existence depended. It thus becomes unclear whether one can keep on writing as if the reader is the same academic professional, with its specific prejudices, habits, and sensitivities, or whether some new mode of writing, and new topics and new sets of preoccupations, should be developed. Complicating things further is that the position of more political academic work has always had an ambivalent relation to this institutional position. Indeed, a new realm of politicized writing has evolved in many new journals and other publication venues, one that does not depend on institutionalized academia and that does not follow its writing conventions (but is also different from the older lay publications, its interests sometimes echoing the narrow areas of specialization of the more academic kind of writing). One would be tempted to call such new forms of knowledge production neoliberal, even when the writing itself is completely antagonistic to the current hegemonic mode of social organization. That this book follows the conventions of the older academic style should be seen as itself somewhat of a utopian gesture—in the precise sense of evoking a social world that no longer exist—an ambivalent position if there ever was one.
But more practical problems result from this indeterminacy of audience, ones that have to do with more technical decisions on the composition of the following chapters, and which make introductions into more elaborate constructions than they were before. Thus, the introduction becomes something like a space in which one explicitly projects the book’s expected audience, as if creating the readers in imagination. But the contradictions are not always easily solved on the level of the introduction’s form itself. And so the crisis of the humanities—of which the devolving of theory from the lingua franca of the humanities into simply another hermetic field is surely another sign—is visible in the division of this introduction. In the first part, I provide an outline of the book’s arguments. And to the second (and longer) part of it I leave the theoretical discussion of what this book is trying to achieve—placing its intervention not only within the world of theory but also in relation to the global study of literature, and with relation to the historiography of Israel and Zionism—for it should be clear that this book is no less about history and the theoretical problem of periodization than it is a book of literary criticism. In this latter part, I will briefly touch on the book’s chapters again, as they relate to the theoretical issues raised. Any reader that has no interest in this more theoretical exercise of framing the book’s intervention is welcome to skip the theoretical part altogether.
The present volume presents to the reader a new history of Israeli literature. To produce this new history I discuss three moments of transformation in Israeli letters: the 1950s, which are usually considered the moment in which Zionist realism gives way to the universalist “New Wave” of 1960s authors; the 1980s, which are usually taken to designate the moment in which Israeli literary postmodernism was born—with its accompanying multicultural valence; and the present moment (or rather a moment that began roughly in the middle of the first decade of the new millennium). This latter moment is usually not called anything in literary-critical commentary, for it is hardly discussed at all—a problem in its own right to which we will give due attention in the last two chapters of this book.
Even before the collapse of disciplinary boundaries, literary history has always been a strange creature—not entirely distinguishable from literary criticism, from the sociology of culture, or from history proper. So that this book forms new connections between literary and socioeconomic change should not be entirely surprising. And it is on this ground—of the mediation of social form into the realm of representation—that this book most clearly challenges existing histories of Israeli literature, and of Israel and Zionism generally. Most existing approaches, as the second part of this introduction will amply demonstrate, suffer from conceptual weakness, which is itself the result of the absence of a clear theory of mediation between the social and the cultural; but most also suffer from an impoverishment of the imagination, whose source is their commitment to the categories of the literary-historical paradigm established in the 1960s. It is the inability to go beyond this narrative in any substantial way that is the problem that is most forcefully tackled by this current volume. I hesitate to name the approach taken here a totalizing and a Marxist one, and not only because of the prejudices and confusions still associated with these labels (which seem to finally be on the wane, with the decline of Cold-War era liberalism). But also because to call the approach taken here a Marxist one is for many to commit to seeing it as one possible approach among many others, in some kind of irreducible multiplicity of interpretive options. But it is precisely this seeming universality whose particularity is challenged in this book. It is not possible to accept the narrative offered here alongside these other ones; the narrative offered here becomes incoherent if it is seen as existing alongside these other narratives, rather than as these very narratives’ transformation or reworking. It is this latter point that has to be kept in mind if one were to call this present volume a Marxist history of Israeli literature.
Summary of the Argument
The first chapter engages what I am calling the prehistory of Israeli fiction—beginning somewhat arbitrarily with Herzl’s Altneuland and continuing to the pre-statehood years of the first half of the twentieth century. I choose here to focus on the largely forgotten realist literature of the 1920s and 1930s, which is usually deemed to be nothing but Zionist propaganda. I argue that 1930s novel