Text

theses

This dissertation explores the differences in constructions of memory and of authorship in diasporic and national literature through a close reading of “A Guest for the Night” by S.Y. Agnon and the Yash novels by Jacob Glatstein. The reading is premised on a diasporic conception of Jewish literature as a cosmopolitan web of centers of production, interacting with each other. The two authors write in similar circumstances about visiting the Eastern European home in the interwar period. Both emigrated from Eastern Europe to Palestine and the United States respectively and their modernist homecoming narratives present the dilemmas of Jewish authorship on the cusp of modernity. The discussion of memory reveals its interactions with place, language and peoplehood. The novels present a rupture in Jewish memory as a result of the upheavals of emmigration and the demise of traditional Jewish life. The authors ask questions about the continuity of Jewish narrative and life in face of changing relations to place and language. Agnon’s novel grapples with the transition from Diaspora to the ancient, historic homeland and explores the possibility of reconstructing Jewish life in it. At the same time Agnon interrogates the viability of Jewish life in a diasporic place. Agnon imiplicitly offers an alternative to the Zionist vision. His historical conception allows to mend the rupture in Jewish memory. Glatstein develops an alternative, highly flexible relation between memory and place and offers modes of commemoration that are not related to fixed locations and are based on language and culture. The discussion of authorship looks at the way the authors see their own role in the transition from tradition to modernity. Agnon’s struggle with non traditional Jewish writing unfolds through his relations to different models of authorship. I explore his struggle with the romantic ideal of male authorship, and present this attempt as analogous to siring a new Jewish body in place of the dead and scattered exilic one. The discussion of Glatstein’s concept of authorship reveals a highly modernist, at times post modernist and performative conception of subjectivity. He presents the writer as performing a role, while using traditional themes of Yiddish theater as subcontext.

ETD_5300

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

by Shirli Sela-Levavi

doi:10.7282/T3CZ357H

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.