This essay examines the moral dimension of Jewish survival during the Holocaust as portrayed in the Salamandra sextet by Yehiel Dinur, known as “Ka-Tzetnik 135633.” Critics such as Omer Bartov and Iris Milner observe a collective process of social and moral disintegration among Ka-Tzetnik’s characters — reflecting factual occurrences familiar from the work of survivors and scholars, such as Primo Levi, Eugen Kogon, or Wolfgang Sofsky. My close reading of Ka-Tzetnik’s novels, in contrast, suggests that Salamandra (1946), House of Dolls (1953) and Piepel (1961) abound in acts that demonstrate how solidarity and humanity were retained among Jews in the camps and ghettos. Furthermore, following James Phelan’s recent work on literary ethics, I show that this type of acts is in fact accentuated in the novels’ rhetorical design, which constructs the author’s moral viewpoint as the upholding of spiritual and moral values in resistance to the Nazi genocide.

June 2016: Or Rogovin (Ph.D. 2012, University of Washington) is the Silbermann Family Visiting Assistant Professor of Modern Hebrew at the Department of Languages, Cultures, and Linguistics at Bucknell University. His areas of research and teaching include Modern Jewish Literatures, Holocaust Studies, and narrative theory, especially responses to the Holocaust in Hebrew and Israeli literature. Recent publications:

“‘Count him a human being’: David Grossman’s See Under: Love and Holocaust Perpetrators in Israeli Fiction” (forthcoming in Prooftexts).

“The Limits of Holocaust Representation in the Fiction of the 1948 Generation.” Iyunim Be-Tekumat Israel 23(2013):176–203 (in Hebrew).

“Chelm as Shtetl: Y. Y. Trunk’s Khelemer khakhomim.” Prooftexts, 29:2 (2010): 242–272.

June 2013: Nora Hämäläinen is a post-doctoral researcher affiliated with the University of Helsinki,. Her doctoral dissertation A Literary Turn (University of Helsinki, 2009) treated the roles of narrative literature in contemporary analytic moral philosophy. In 2009–2011 she worked as editor in chief of the Helsinki based cultural magazine Ny Tid. She has co-edited the anthologies Skilsmässoboken (The Divorce Book, Helsinki: Söderströms, 2008, with Solveig Arle), and Language, Ethics and Animal Life — Wittgenstein and  Beyond (New York: Bloomsbury, 2012, with Niklas Forsberg and Mikel Burley). She has written about philosophical methodology, the ethical uses of literature, moral change, and the philosophical work of Iris Murdoch. She is currently working on moral philosophy and the renegotiation of moral norms in self-help literature.

January 2013: Dr. Tammy Amiel Houser is a lecturer at the Department of Literature, Language, and the Arts of the Open University of Israel. Her research is in Comparative Literature and its intersection with feminist theories, political conflicts, and ethical perspectives. She has written on Ian McEwan’s fiction, (Connotations: A Journal for Critical Debate). Her book, Feminist Perspectives on the Coming-of-Age Novel (Hebrew), which deals with George Eliot’s reshaping of the Bildungsroman, is forthcoming from the Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics (Tel Aviv University) in cooperation with Hakibbuz Hameuchad Press.

This essay argues that Keats’s Isabella and Hyperion not only present the aesthetics of suffering (“Sorrow more beautiful than Beauty’s self”) but also reveal that within profound loss and pain there lie ethical possibilities that can be discovered through fidelity to existential and psychological uncertainty, or in Keats’s terms, through lingering “at the yawning tomb.”  As Isabella inconsolably weeps over her pot of basil and Saturn lies “nerveless” on the earth, the aesthetic and ethical dimensions of a state of total uncertainty and doubt are explored in the poems. A re-reading of these two poems suggests that negative capability is often attained by an encounter with the ultimate mystery, death, an experience that challenges and even overwhelms the subject’s sense of identity. Situated within a complex matrix of ontology, epistemology, and ethics, Keats’s concept of negative capability suggests that an encounter with death is not merely a disaster -- it also serves as a self-negation that forcibly empties the mind of personal, social, and historical certainty. This emptied mind is then capable of imagining hitherto unforeseen ethical possibilities. Keats’s negative capability then, beyond its aesthetic productivity, suggests that within traumatic loss there lies the potential for fundamental socio-political reorientation.

The essay creates a dialogue between two disciplines that are rarely brought together: narratology and analytical philosophy. In interpreting Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, it points to similarities between the recent interest of analytic philosophers in self-deception and the interest of literary scholars in narrative unreliability, showing that a better understanding of self-deception can be achieved by a mutual illumination of philosophy and literature: the reading of Ishiguro’s novel relies on distinctions used in analytical philosophy, but the novel, in its turn, provides a further contribution to philosophical discussions.   

As Ishiguro’s novel shows, narratives in which the narrating character is self-deceived tend to create an oscillation between (at least) two tenable versions of the story: one that imputes self-deception to the narrating character and one that accepts the plausibility of his version. They also tend to give rise to two hypotheses concerning the motivation of the narrating character to perform the narrative act. One hypothesis is that the motivation is to reinforce self-deception; the other is that the act of narration is motivated also by a (partly unconscious) desire to reveal the truth and comprehend the course of events that has led to self-deception.

When both motivations of a self-deceiver’s narration are operative, the verbal expression of self-deception is considerably complicated. The butler Stevens’ words, like the words of self-deceivers in general, both disclose and conceal, express guilt and deny it, try to comprehend the incoherence of his beliefs and to blur it. Works of literature remind us that self-deception is not a constant state of mind or the final stage of a process but a constituent of many mental processes that may be transitional and dynamic.

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.

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.