Browsing by Subject "Hebrew literature"

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Topographies of kitsch : locating and dislocating tyrannical kitsch in contemporary Russian, Hebrew and Serbo-Croatian literature
(2016-08) Flider, Marina; Garza, Thomas J.; Grumberg, Karen; Richmond-Garza, Elizabeth; Kuzmic, Tatiana; Hake, Sabine
Much of what is known about contemporary Russia, Israel, and the Serbo-Croatian region is gleaned from the international headlines of newspapers. Yet, the continual political upheavals, military actions, and social strife that define the realities of these countries constitute only the faint backdrops to the emerging bodies of literature from these countries. The novels of writers such as Victor Pelevin, Orly Castel-Bloom, and Miljenko Jergović exemplify recent literary trends that default on the critical portrayal of the commonplace lives and commodity cultures in their respective regions. These novels obsessively depict the quotidian and trivial, documenting kitsch rather than war. Yet, the contemporary actualities that are reflected in these texts are the accumulation of historical moments that have brought on periods of neo-nationalism-the same neo-nationalistic movements that are responsible for the news headlines that they produce. The struggle to construct their national identities, both politically and culturally, and against he forces of twenty-first century global commercialism defines the particular brand of mythology that these countries are disseminating. Claiming cultural exceptionalism while embracing the onslaught of globalization, the liminally Western countries must take account of the pervasive influence of Western media and commoditization that, in the digital age, reaches their demographic through multiple outlets, regardless of the overt and latent systems of censorship set in place by their governments. Rather than attempting to thwart the consumption of Western media by their citizens, the political machines of these nations make allowances for its presence. Western television programs, name brands, and popular cultural trends are omnipresent in these regions. Fed to citizens through a political filter, the proliferation of Western media is incorporated into the national ideology and collective memory of the country, creating a semblance of freedom and cosmopolitanism, while leveling down individual liberties and cultural possibilities. The byproduct of this phenomenon is kitsch. The permutations and societal effects of kitsch are some of the central but often overlooked themes of contemporary Israeli, Russian and BSC literature. The following study will argue for the importance of detecting and examining the depictions of kitsch in these regional literatures. More than a study of consumerist practices, such an analysis promises to reveal the political charge of these ostensibly innocuous commonplace objects, which are revealed to be tools for the propagation of the homogenizing, objectifying ideologies of their respective countries.
Towards an ethics of intersubjectivity : affective textures of empathy in modern Arabic and Hebrew literature and film
(2017-09-13) Green, Rachel Elizabeth; Grumberg, Karen; El-Ariss, Tarek; Wojciehowski, Hannah C; Di-Capua, Yoav; Bos, Pascale R
Comparative scholarship of Israeli and Palestinian literatures has posited various forms of a relational literary space, often predicated on implicit hopes for empathy. While not disavowing these hopes, per se, this dissertation takes empathy itself as a starting point for a critical appraisal of the ethics and aesthetics of intersubjectivity. Analyzing Hebrew and Arabic literary and cinematic works from both within and beyond the geographical/epistemological spaces of the Arab-Israeli conflict, this dissertation is positioned at the intersection of comparative readings of Hebrew and Arabic, on one hand, and Empathy Studies on the other. Works considered include Ḥanān al-Shaykh's Story of Zahra and Hūdā Barakāt's Disciples of Passion (Lebanon), Ibrāhīm al-Kūnī's The Bleeding of the Stone (Libya), Sa‘ūd al-Sanʻusi's The Bamboo Stalk (Kuwait), Yoel Hoffmann's The Book of Joseph and Shira Geffen's Self Made (Israel), as well as S Yizhar's "Khirbet Khizeh," Emīl Ḥabībī's "Pessoptimist," and Ghassān Kanafānī's "Returning to Haifa." This dissertation first argues that the Question of Palestine, sui generis, played an outsized role in shaping the post-1948 aesthetics of empathy in Hebrew and Arabic literature and film writ large. In dialogue with the conflict, some works in Hebrew tended towards an ethic of shooting and crying (yorim ve-bochim), a position of collective victimization, while some in Arabic tended towards an ethics of commitment (iltizām) and resistance (muqāwama), or an externalization of aggression in the belief that action would lead to resolution. Such an understanding gestures towards the related yet divergent histories of emotion of Zionism and Arab Nationalism, respectively. However, it also renders visible the myriad ways in which subsequent authors and filmmakers in both linguistic spheres have come to resist the proscription of empathy by reclaiming the intersubjective. While the Middle East has long factored as a site of extreme conflict in the Metropolitan imagination, Empathy Studies as a field has paid surprisingly scant attention to the region's cultural production. By reading three distinct affective textures of intersubjectivity, including frightful, chastened, and ambivalent, this dissertation seeks to move the field of Empathy Studies beyond binaries of pro-empathy and anti-empathy, opening it up to considering the many affective textures of the intersubjective. Such an opening further informs and is informed by developments in the post-Arab Spring (post-2011) cultural spheres in Israel and the Arabic-speaking world that have rejected the ideological and emotional binaries of an earlier generation.
Uri-Nisn Gnesin : between the worlds, belonging to both
(2012-05) Bredstein, Andrey Alexander, 1970-; Grumberg, Karen; Raizen, Esther; Ghanoonparvar, Mohammad; Hoberman, John; Livers, Keith
This dissertation examines the life and work of the Jewish writer Uri-Nisn Gnesin (1879-1913). Living in Russia, using Yiddish in his daily life, and writing prose in Hebrew, Gnesin was part of a multicultural and multilingual generation, which was too assimilated to live the traditional life of its fathers, and yet, not able to break with it completely. For many Russian Jews, this dual identity, rarely recognized in modern scholarly discourse on Hebrew literature, resulted in psychological discomfort, feelings of guilt, and other traumas. Addressing this identity crisis, I show how the worldview of an assimilated Russian Jew is reflected in Gnesin’s Hebrew fiction. I offer an alternative view of Gnesin as a Jewish-Russian writer whose dual identity played a more complex role in his literary work and whose influence transcended a simple knowledge of languages or classic texts. It was not merely a language or a book, but the unique Jewish-Slavic atmosphere of small Eastern European towns that provided Gnesin with all the models necessary for thinking, feeling, and writing. In my study, I consider theories of canonization to demonstrate the reason why Gnesin has first and foremost been categorized as a Hebrew writer. Contemporary scholars of modern Hebrew fiction generally agree that Gnesin’s fiction is secular due to the non-Jewish associative infrastructure of his work. By exploring the historical and spiritual conditions of Gnesin’s generation, I attempt to overcome the limitations of such a view, which overemphasizes the role of language in his development as a writer. A functional analysis of Gnesin’s literary language maintains that although he found his best form of expression in literary Hebrew, it appeared mostly in the final stages of his writing. I propose that Gnesin and that whole generation of modern Hebrew writers used a special “hyper-language” consisting of three integral parts: a natively spoken language, a commonly spoken non-Jewish national language, and a written literary language. Ultimately, Gnesin appears to be a fin de siècle writer who used Hebrew language as a sophisticated tool to propagate his troubled Jewish-Russian experience.