With reference to the establishment of the Venice Ghetto 500 years ago as a landmark in the history of Jewish spaces, the “Introduction” surveys the literary/geographical/cultural spaces of modern Jewish experience discussed in the papers of the forum.

In Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale, Walter’s search for signs of discontent and mental anguish on his wife’s inscrutable countenance invites an analysis of the minds of its characters. Walter’s and Griselda’s mental functioning merits attention from the perspective of contemporary cognitive theories such as Alan Palmer’s concept of the social mind. This perspective reveals Chaucer’s concern with the problem of human minds’ being closed off from the observer or else their thinking being transmittable. The prominence of the intermental processes of the Saluzzans in Clerks’ Tale suggests a view of intelligence as shared rather than dualistic. The anti-dualistic stance is reinforced by his protagonists’ eventual failure to bracket their minds off from each other and their people. However intently Walter and Griselda hide their thoughts behind the impenetrability of their faces and physical behaviour, as the narrative progresses their minds become not only readable but also unified. 

Dr. Narinsky’s research combines narratological and cognitive theories with medieval studies. She is currently working on medieval dream narratives, from a narratological perspective. 

Samuel Beckett´s poetics offers a paradoxical fusion of the compulsion to write and an inability to do so. Such a slippage from inspiration to expiration is in many ways definitive of twentieth-century thought on writing and subjectivity. Fraught with an obsessive preoccupation with the obligation to write, Molloy houses a crew of agents whose sole purpose is to impress this obligation upon two rather unwilling protagonists. This paper argues that the novel’s self-reflexive preoccupation with writing is symptomatic of a late modernist suspicion of discrete and independent authorship. In an attempt to tease out the fluid conceptualizations of writing and subjectivity as they emerge in the text, these figures of imposition are read alongside Coleridge’s preface to “Kubla Khan,” a literary antecedent that haunts the novel. The paper suggests that the evolution from a Romantic to a Modernist conceptualization of inspiration hinges on the figure of interruption. If the anxiety that riddles Coleridge´s preface is brought on by the inevitable cessation of writing as epitomized in the “person from Porlock,” Molloy  demonstrates that writing is interruption; it is a doing and undoing of the subject within the endlessly circulating language of a poststructuralist intertext. Beckett´s reworking of Coleridge´s anecdote unfolds as a transgressive and generative exploration of subjectivity that is inseparable from the novel´s thematization of writing: the subject is both agent and receptacle of the writing that generates him. Turning to the work of Maurice Blanchot and Gilles Deleuze, the paper concludes by considering a writing that exceeds subjectivity and leads beyond dialectics, beyond ontology. 

Yael Levin is Senior Lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her work on Joseph Conrad has appeared in Conradiana, The Conradian, Partial Answers, Secret Sharers (2011) Each Other's Yarns (2013) and her book, Tracing the Aesthetic Principle in Conrad's Novels (Palgrave Macmillan 2008). She is currently working on The Interruption of Writing, a book that traces the evolution of models of textual production and creative agency from Romanticism to the Digital Age.

(updated January 2016)

Yael Levin is Senior Lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her work on Joseph Conrad has appeared in Conradiana, The Conradian, Partial Answers, Secret Sharers (2011) Each Other's Yarns (2013) and her book, Tracing the Aesthetic Principle in Conrad's Novels (Palgrave Macmillan 2008). She is currently working on The Interruption of Writing, a book that traces the evolution of models of textual production and creative agency from Romanticism to the Digital Age.

updated January 2016

This article traces literary depictions of the city of Haifa, starting from its utopian literary prototype in Theodor Herzl’s influential Altneuland (1902), and continuing with later Israeli writing, by Yehudit Hendel, Sami Michael, and Hillel Mittelpunkt. The article shows how the Israeli works discussed set literary Haifa as a stage for examining questions of identity, belonging, and the relations between individual and society, through an emphasis on the complex ties between language, ethnicity, and space. The literary city of these works is compared to the city of Herzl’s utopian vision. I argue that the evolution of literary Haifa is associated  with shifts in Israeli collective self-perception: from the utopian mode of thought, in which difficulties and complexities remain invisible, through the gradual turning of the gaze towards the difficulties and fractures in the emergent new society (first within the Jewish society, but then also outside it — among the Arab minority); and finally, to an inability to accept the absence of utopia from the present, leading to escapism and a quest for the longed-for ideal in the pre-national past.

This article traces the ways in which memories of historical trauma inscribed in the built environment of Buenos Aires, Lima, and Cusco inform the fiction of Argentine Tununa Mercado and Peruvian Karina Pacheco Medrano. Each author represents fictional cityspaces after projects of public memorialization have already begun to carve out spaces of memory in response to dictatorship (Argentina) and to the conflict with the Shining Path (Peru). These novelists, neither of whom is Jewish, map the relationship between the spatial dimension of the textual and the textual dimension of the spatial, acknowledging the value and meaning of invisibilized Jewish bodies whose presence continues to haunt the modern urban space.

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.

This article explores Heinrich Heine’s two texts about Jews and Jewish life, Über Polen and Der Rabbi von Bacherach, to show how the foundations for a Jewish homeland were laid in Jewish literature of early 19^th-century Western and Central Europe. The article demonstrates how a common Jewish space was established in Heine’s texts and how this space intellectually and emotionally came to signify home for modern Jewish readers. It presents a new perspective on the spaces of Heine’s early works by focusing on what was particularly Jewish about these spaces. Heine’s establishment of a Jewish cultural space began with a journey to Eastern Europe. In Polish villages Heine found the inspiration for a Jewish cultural landscape that he would describe in a romantically idealized way in Über Polen and Der Rabbi von Bacherach, attaching positive values to Jewish traditional lifestyle and incorporating scriptural references of the kind that made traditional Jewish life accessible to assimilated Jews and non-Jews alike. Heine took his readers into Jewish spaces such as a Jewish home, synagogue, and street. He gave the Jewish readers a sense of togetherness, of belonging to a Jewish space that was available through literature. The article explores the potential of Jewish cultural space and shows how Heine constructed a modern Jewish cultural space with room for both traditional and modern Jews.

June 2016: Cecilie S. Schrøder Simonsen is a PhD Fellow at the Department of Culture and Identity at Roskilde University, Denmark. Her work approaches an understanding of modern Jewish spaces by exploring the cultural significance of home in 19th-century Western European sources. She is particularly interested in Jewish ghetto literature, historical novels, and village tales. Her publications include articles and chapters on 19th-century Jewish cultural space and Danish Jewish writer Meïr Aron Goldschmidt. 

Both William Shakespeare (1564–1616) and his contemporary Chinese counterpart Tang Xianzu (1550–1616) explore three types of human lust — incest, zoophilia and greed for power but show remarkable disparities in the ways of treating them. Shakespearean plays and western classical drama in general present more severe forms of incest, whereas Tang Xianzu’s works and traditional Chinese drama as a whole are quite free from incest between blood relatives, which is muted as an abhorred violation of Confucian principles guiding family life. By contrast, Tang Xianzu demonstrates tolerance of zoophilia; whereas Shakespeare’s oblique evocation of zoophilia in A Midsummer Night’s Dream reflects his culture’s intolerance of bestiality. In regard to greed for power, Tang Xianzu’s protagonists never have political ambitions that go beyond the position of prime minister, showing no covetous desire for the throne; Shakespeare, however, includes several incidents of regicide in his plays. The paper points to the difference in the cultural contexts of the two masters lived that to a large extent determine the difference in their ways of representing these forms of lust.

June 2016: Chen Maoqing is Associate Professor in the English Department, the School of Foreign Languages, of East China Normal University in Shanghai. His research interests are comparative drama, Australian literature, and applied linguistics. As a Fulbright visiting scholar, he researched “Traditional Chinese Drama on the American Stage: Performance and Receptions since 1850s” at the University of California, Irvine, in 2013-14. He has just completed the Shanghai municipal project on “The Dissemination and Reception of Traditional Chinese Theatres in Hawaii” and is currently working on the state-funded project “The Dissemination and Reception of Traditional Chinese Theaters across the United States of America.” His articles include “Chinese Plays on the Hawaiian Stage: 1905-1976,” “Women as ‘Dasein’: A Philosophical Approach to Maria Irene Fornes’ Fefu and Her Friends,” “A Young Artist Struggling in the Bush: On the Heroine in Miles Franklin’s My Brilliant Career” and “Tacit Knowledge and Second Language Acquisition.”       

June 2016: Erica Smeltzer is a Ph.D. Candidate in Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz.  Her dissertation project is entitled, Urban Space and National Memory: The Narratives of Prague, Gdańsk and Berlin. It addresses the representation of national history and identity in the physical and literary topography of urban centers. 

This article analyzes Proust’s listening by placing it in the contexts of French reception of late Beethoven in Proust’s era.  At stake are questions of perception of and through the work of art, of music as the figure of something greater than love or desire in Proust.  Thinking music and silence together, through the framework of “modern” listening, allows us to see how Proust seeks new definitions of time within subjectivity.  By bringing together Beethoven’s era, Proust’s, and our own, we can articulate how both Beethoven and Proust push the limits of tonality and temporality in order to hear what had never before been sounded and to which their work gives voice.

By discussing two literary texts by immigrants from Europe in America, Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Enemies, a Love Story (1966) and Edgar Hilsenrath’s Fuck America (Bronskys Geständnis, 1980), the essays examines the Holocaust survivors’ gradual subversion of pre-determined national, religious, and communal identities. In each of the texts, the urban environment has a double and seemingly contradictory effect on the survivors’ lives: it is an obstacle but also an opportunity. The multiplying sounds, languages, faces, and buildings seem at first to be a threat to the protagonists’ existence but later on provide the means for their radical liberation. As an eternal outsider, the survivor’s past experience correlates and is constantly juxtaposed to his current urban life. This juxtaposition creates a desire for anonymity, as an immediate reaction to the identity which was foisted upon each protagonist during the war in Europe. Singer’s Herman Broder and Hilsenrath’s Jakob Bronsky are literary models that offer, in their grim life stories, a new set of human relationships, personal behavioral characteristics, and private day to day procedures that correlate to the deviant city’s schizoid features. My discussion of the novels relies on Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life. De Certeau’s observations regarding the ordinary mundane procedures that constitute the urban “pedestrian” text illuminate the way in which the protagonists’ stories incorporate, rather than ignore or resolve, their contradictory, fragmentary, and unsystematic components.