The essay examines some of the fascinating ways in which islands have inspired writers, and especially poets, into acts of symbolization in which an island provides the pretext for a variety of compulsive themes that range from the love or fear of solitude, isolation, and the need to escape to or from an island. The recurrent figures of this allegorical mode include Crusoe, Caliban, Odysseus, and The Man Who Loved Islands.

The paper explores the relationship between a language and its environment. It focuses on Chinua Achebe’s experimentation with English as a suitable language for depicting the African landscape in Anthills of the Savannah. Since landscape was an imperial fascination, it was inevitable that with the expansion of the British Empire the English pictorial rhetoric would be exported to the colonies. This export brought out visual and psychological disparities between the changeable African landscape and the invariably picturesque English language. The conventions of picturesque description encoded in the language were imposed on the landscape, implicitly affirming and naturalizing the values of the colonialist, but failing to do justice to a genuinely African world-view. Achebe believes that despite its colonial bias English can still be a useful tool for African writers to capture and promote their ancestral heritage; nonetheless he questions whether it can lose enough of its own cultural past to be made suitable for an African discourse.

Vladimir Pecherin (1807-1885), a Russian political emigré and Catholic convert was a controversial figure both in nineteenth-century Ireland and in Russian intellectual history. In his autobiographical notes and in the letters to his Russian corespondents of the 1860s and the 1870s, eventually collected in Apologia pro vita mea (Mémoires d'outre-tombe), Pecherin provides a vivid display of the evolution of Russian thought. His writings as a whole constitute an artistic presentation of the Russian Zeitgeist. Certain glaring contradictions between the ideas expressed in Pecherin's Russian correspondence and the reality of his long life within the Catholic Church require explanation. The article focuses on the authorial intention behind Pecherin’s autobiographical writing. In the hope of cementing his connection with Russia, Pecherin created in his memoirs the largely stock literary image of a “superfluous man,” a dominant literary figure of nineteenth-century Russian literature. Pecherin’s practical activity within the Catholic Church was, however, by no means superfluous, as his reputation in Dublin attests. Pecherin’s epistles to Russia invert the genre of  “confession of conversion” and form a “confession of disillusionment.” Pecherin’s “hero” writes a repentant story in which he recounts a life-long pattern of devotion to various deceptive illusions, among which he counts Socialism, Hegelianism, as well as Catholicism and religion in general. The constant reinventions of himself are matched by surprising flexibility of his literary style, which seems to imitate the major voices of Russian classic literature, from Karamzin and Dostoevsky to Turgenev. If we acknowledge that Pecherin’s memoirs are primarily a work of art and only then a source of historically accurate information, many of his apparent contradictions are explained.

The article is a historiographical against-the-grain reading of archetypal constructions of Virginia Woolf’s “madness.” A genealogical tracing of Woolf’s own testimonials concerning her mental life is juxtaposed with the interpretive analytic specularization of her primary biographers. This new lens exposes the normative reading practices that have produced, simultaneously, both the problematic of Woolf’s “madness” and a near elision of any traces of the conditions of its own production. Woolf’s writing about her “contrary instincts” is examined without searching for underlying pathology; the latter would have amounted to reinscribing Woolf in the institualization of “mental illness.”

The essay discusses parallels in the work of Franz Kafka and Shmuel Yosef Agnon as writers whose rebellion against tradition and authority was complicated by ambivalent nostalgia for the harmonies of God and Kaiser.

Major works:

   in Hebrew
      Between Laughter and Tears (on Mendele Mokher Sefarim), Tel-Aviv, 1965
      The Hebrew Historical Drama, Jerusalem, 1970
      A New Wave in Modern Hebrew Narrative Fiction, Tel-Aviv, 1971
      The Narrative Art of Agnon, Tel-Aviv, 1973
      Hebrew Narrative Fiction  1880-1980 (Five Volumes) Tel-Aviv, 1977-1998

  in English
     The Shadows Within: Essays on Modern Jewish Writers, Philadelphia,1987
     S. Y. Agnon: A Revolutionary Traditionalist, New-York,1989
     Modern Hebrew Fiction, Bloomington, 2000

      The New Tradition: Essays on Modern Hebrew Literature, 2006

  in German
     Die Macht der Identitaet, Frankfurt, 1986
     Die Geschichte der modernen hebraeschen Literatur, Frankfurt, 1996.

updated in January 2007

This reading of Othello offers an explanation of Othello's own reasons for withdrawing from love through the distinctly murderous route he chooses. I read Othello as cooperating with, and perhaps even using, Iago in order to work himself out of love. In this he is responding to a multi-dimensional attack, which is how he experiences Desdemona's "too deep" love. The play is thus gradually building up a spectacle of Liebestod: once in Desdemona's annihilating love, twice in Othello murdering her--dying "upon a kiss." More generally, this essay considers the competing claims of the ideology of erotic merging on the one hand and the ideal of developing a clearly bounded self on the other. I argue that a “moral negotiation” with a work of literature (Othello) can create a fruitful confrontation with this familiar tension. The rewards for such criticism are both moral and literary: moral, since literature facilitates modes of moral reflection that cannot be activated by employing non-literary moral reflection; literary, because a moral dialogue with literary texts is not only possible but also aesthetically enriching. On the theoretical front, this essay thus continues what has been called “the literary turn” in moral philosophy, which supplements the work of other philosophers of literature by highlighting the capacity of the literary work to form a critique of an embedded ideology (in my reading, a prevalent erotic ideology). Finally, I relate ethical criticism to the current debate over cultural studies and the anxieties associated with the disappearance of the literary. I argue that taking an “ethical turn” enables literary criticism to claim an important distinctiveness in contrast to other modalities of cultural critique.

This essay proposes to retrace some aspects of the “ethical turn” that affects the humanities today to the codification of “sympathy” in what Geoffrey Hartman has described as Wordsworth’s “rhetoric of community.” Focusing on the figure of the infant in Wordsworth’s Salisbury Plain poems, the essay argues for a recovery in Wordsworth’s text of the critique of sympathy accompanying the ideology of sympathy of which he has become a canonical representative. While the ideology of sympathy typically denies the difference sympathy is said to celebrate, Wordsworth’s text is read here as a timely record of this defensive encryption inviting resistance to the current privatization of sympathy as surrogate justice.

In Ben Jonson’s Masque of Blackness and Masque of Beauty an early modern argument against colonization is presented by an African character, Niger.  The themes of assimilation and self-determination remain in tension throughout the plays, a quite early recognition of the struggle between cultural identity, race, and global agendas.

Is there a “natural” fit between gender and the pacifist or military impulse? The article traces the trajectory of the thinking on this issue ever since the initiation of women into the peace movements of nineteenth-century Europe, placing it in the context of the general philosophical shift from essentialism to constructivism. It is argued that the demotion of “the maternal” -- the emblem of pacifism since the early 19th century -- took place in the later work of Virginia Woolf, well before the post-gender heydays of the 1980s. Although the term gender was obviously not available to Woolf, she undermined the conventional division between the sexes through her use of the term androgyny, which prepared her to take on the conventional discourse about aggression, war, and maternal pacifism. A contrastive analysis of the uses and abuses of sexual difference and the maternal metaphor in the works of Woolf and the 19th-century pacifist Charlotte Gilman shows that while amalgamating liberal and radical positions, Woolf’s Three Guineas (1938) in fact anticipated – via its hostile dialogue with Freud – not only the gendering of peace and war but also the contemporary psycho-political analyses of the nexus of sexuality and nationalism.

January 2004: Yael S. Feldman is the Abraham I. Katsh Professor of Hebrew Culture and Education and Professor of Comparative Literature at NYU, where she teaches Hebrew and Comparative Literature and Gender Theory. She is Associate Editor of the literary journals Prooftexts and Hebrew Studies. The latest of her five books, No Room of Their Own: Gender and Nation in Israeli Women’s Fiction (Columbia University Press, 1999) was a National Jewish Book Awards Finalist. The Hebrew version, Lelo heder mishelahen (Hakkibutz hameuchad, 2002) won the Abraham Friedman Award for Hebrew Literature (2003). Current research: the nexus of politics and psychoanalysis in theories of peace and in Modern Hebrew culture.

The thesis of the paper is that Jews are represented in the poetry as the mimetic Other for identification, sponsoring fidelity to faith, the excluded Other allowing consolidation of faith, and the symbolic Other providing a discourse of history as theophany; in representation of the Jewish Other, the Anglo-Saxon textual community furthers the project of nation formation.

Alexander Blok’s unfinished poem Retribution (1910–1921), regarded by the contemporaries as his spiritual testament, depicts the destinies of Russia as part of the total struggle between cosmic forces which was reflected in the historical catastrophes of the late 19th – early 20th centuries. The essay uses the notion of the chronotope to analyze the structure of the poem. The time-space of the poem is the vast expanse of the Russian empire during the wars between East and West (the wars between Russian and Turkey, Russian and Japan, World War I). The chronotope of the poem reflect tensions between Westernizers and Slavophiles, as well as mythological historiosophical positions of such diverse thinkers as Vladimir Soloviev and Helena Blavatsky. Its mythical, epic, historical, and lyrical constituents seem to predict cosmic clashes; instead, however, the lyrical chronotope of the poem gains predominance and translates cosmic conflicts into the emotional turmoil and death of the lyrical hero.

The historical caesura of the Holocaust bisects the twentieth century, its horror effecting a kind of temporal doubling or fold in the psyches of survivors as well as a permanent damage on Enlightenment conceptions of the progressive march of time. The traumatic experience of a continual turning back inflects the twentieth-century novel and our readings of it, calling into question modernist tropes of redemption. This essay examines changes in the way that both the passage of time and the ghostly return of the dead are portrayed, first in a modern text, Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, which deals with World War I, and then in two postmodern works both of which inscribe a vain dream of the rectification of Holocaust trauma: Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow and W. G. Sebald’s The Emigrants. My emphasis is on trajectories of plot and memory, trajectories that trauma distorts and the artistic impulse inclines to even out (as in Amis’s trope of the story told backwards, with genocide undone). While modernist experimentalism cannot help indulging in redemptive fantasies, it also incorporates its own critique of this conservative longing.