Signatures of struggle : the figuration of collectivity in Israeli fiction / Oded Nir.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Online resource; title from PDF title page (EBSCO, viewed October 1, 2018).

Intro; Contents; Acknowledgments; Introduction: Periodizing Israeli Literature; Summary of the Argument; Periodizing Israeli Literature, or Trying to Imagine the Present; 1 Prehistory: Zionist Hebrew Literary Realism, between Altneuland and Khirbet Khizeh; The Structure of Literary Utopia; From Utopia to Realism; Khirbet Khizeh and the Crisis of the Halutzic Transformative Imaginary; 2 From Utopian Project to Utopian Compensation in 1950s Works by Yigal Mossinsohn and Nathan Shaham

Individuality as the Preservation of Historicity: Yigal Mossinsohn's The Way of a Man and the Crisis of the Halutzic Revolutionary ProjectThe Palmach is not a Place, or Alienation from History in Shaham's "Always We"; 3 Then as Farce: Naturalism and Disavowed Failure in 1950s Hebrew Novels by Hanoch Bartov and Yehudit Hendel; Each has Six Wings and the National Deus ex Machina; The Political Secret of Nostalgia in Hendel's Street of Steps; Realism's Demise, Materially

4 Is There Israeli Postmodern Literature? Orly Castel-Bloom, Yehudit Katzir, and the Vicissitudes of National Space-Time in the 1980s and 1990sPlayful Disorientation in Orly Castel-Bloom's Where am I?; Closing the Sea and the Affirmation of the Allegorical; 5 Disorientation and the Genres: David Grossman, Yehoshua Kenaz, and Batya Gur; The Smile of the Lamb and The Pursuit of Peace; Infiltration, or, the Postmodern Soldier; The Detective Returns: Batya Gur and Social Totality; 6 Time in Hiding: Israeli Fiction and Neoliberalism; Searching for Time in a Neoliberal Landscape: Einat Yakir's Sand

Death and Temporality in Ofir Touché Gafla's The Day the Music DiedContemporary Israeli Literary Criticism and Neoliberalism; 7 In Search of New Time: Renarrating Soldier, Pioneer, and the Tel Aviv Subject-to-Come; Beaufort, or, Utopia against Neoliberalism; The Hebrew Condition and the Art of Failure; Fulfillment as an Allegory of a Representational Crisis, or, the Parable of the Donkey and the Fruit Soup; Note Toward the Future; Notes; Bibliography; Index

A Marxist history of Israeli literature, tracing the relations between economic, social, and aesthetic transformations. 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. Oded Nir is Visiting Assistant Professor of Judaic Studies at Franklin & Marshall College.

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