Includes bibliographical references (pages 265-276) and index.
Contents:
Machine generated contents note: 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.
Summary:
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.
Series:
SUNY series in contemporary Jewish literature and culture
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