The Poetics of Composition of the Hebrew Short Story in the Haskalah Period

AJS Review ◽  
1985 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-110
Author(s):  
Yair Mazor

The main goal of this paper is to determine and describe the poetics of composition of the Hebrew short story in the Enlightenment (Haskalah) period. (The Haskalah was a major literary movement in Hebrew literature, mainly in Germany, Austria, and Russia, from 1780 to 1870. This movement evolved in three distinct phases: neoclassic, romantic, and realistic.) The narrative of the Haskalah period has received considerable attention from many critics and researchers, beginning with the first critics of Hebrew literature (such as Kovner, Brainin, Paperna, and Lilienblum), through critics of the early twentieth century (such as Feitelson, Robinson, Zitron, Zinberg, Frischmann, Slouschz, Shapira, Klausner, and Lachower), up to contemporary critics (Patterson, Weinfeld, Wersses, Shaked, Miron, Feingold, and others).

Author(s):  
Bryony Randall

Virginia Woolf was one of the foremost literary innovators of the early twentieth century. A novelist, essayist, short-story writer and literary critic, she was also instrumental in disseminating the work of other key modernist writers, through the Hogarth Press which she ran with her husband Leonard Woolf. Author of such major works as Mrs Dalloway¸ To the Lighthouse and A Room of One’s Own, she was a key figure in the Bloomsbury Group of writers, artists and intellectuals active in the early twentieth century. Although her bouts of mental illness (culminating in her suicide by drowning in March 1941) for many years overshadowed appreciations of her literary output, she is now recognized as one of the most important figures in the literature and culture of the period, whether in terms of the feminist politics of her work, or her ground-breaking experiments with narrative form and technique.


Hydrofictions ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 31-68
Author(s):  
Hannah Boast

This chapter identifies the River Jordan as a major feature of Israeli and Palestinian environmental imaginaries. It argues that the Jordan’s role as a water resource and a contested border gives it crucial material and symbolic functions in imagining the past, present and future of the Israeli and Palestinian nations. The first half examines the meanings of the Jordan to early twentieth-century Zionist ‘pioneers’, including its role in cultivating a sense of home and belonging. The second half identifies representation of the Jordan as dried-up or polluted as a strategy used in recent Palestinian literature to depict Palestinian exile. Texts examined include Moshe Smilansky’s short story ‘Hawaja Nazar’ (1910), Mahmoud Darwish’s poem ‘A River Dies of Thirst’ (2008) and Mourid Barghouti’s memoir I Saw Ramallah (1997).


1991 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-83 ◽  
Author(s):  
Prasenjit Duara

Ever since the enlightenment—the dawn of the modern era—historical understanding has been much concerned with the passage to modernity. In our present century, questions and dilemmas of the transition to modernity and the evaluation of “tradition” in the non-Western world have been central to the historical problematique the world over. I have chosen to analyze the modernist understanding of this historical transition in China not only among professional historians in the West, but among Chinese advocates of modernity. Specifically, I will examine the campaigns attacking popular religion during the first three decades of this century. As a movement advocating the establishment of a rational society, these campaigns offer a view of the understanding of this transition, not just in theory and historiography, but in practice.


2011 ◽  
Vol 56 (3) ◽  
pp. 511-533 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pablo Sánchez León

SummaryThe image of the crowd as an irrational, spontaneous multitude is commonly related to the works of a first generation of social psychologists writing in the early twentieth century, yet its basic features can be found in conceptual innovations developed as early as the Enlightenment. This article focuses on a particular protest in eighteenth-century Spain in order to reflect on the transformation in the meaning of essential terms which occurred in the semantic field of disorder. The so-calledmotín de Esquilacheof 1766 forced the authorities to renew their discourse in order to deprive the movement of legitimacy, fostering semantic innovation. The redefinition of riot implied a process of conceptualization that not only stressed the protagonism of the disenfranchized but also altered a long-established tradition that linked riots to conspiracies and devised a new anthropology depicting the populace as a subject unable to produce ideas on its own.


AJS Review ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-26
Author(s):  
Philip Hollander

This article asserts that politics motivated Aharon Reuveni to employ representations of psychic fragmentation and dysfunctional social institutions to portray Palestinian Jewish life in his novelistic trilogy‘Ad Yerushalayim. These purportedly decadent representations helped him foreground individual and collective flaws he saw limiting the early twentieth-century Palestinian Jewish community's development and promote norms he saw as conducive to growth. Thus, as examination of the trilogy's central male figures demonstrates, Reuveni advances a Zionist masculinity grounded in introspectiveness and ongoing commitment to the achievement of communally shared goals. To further support this Zionist masculine form, the trilogy categorizes men who pursue homosocial ties with others who don't maintain this masculinity as homosexuals. Thus gender and sexuality are used to coerce male readers into adopting specific behavioral norms. This attention to gender and sexuality's role in early twentieth-century Palestinian Hebrew fiction offers a way to grasp its long-overlooked political character.


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