Passages of Belonging: Interpreting Jewish Literatures

by Carola Hilfrich (Editor), Natasha Gordinsky (Editor), Susanne Zepp (Editor)

Overview

In the wake of the spatial and affective turns in Literary Studies in general, and the study of Jewish literatures in particular, this volume shifts focus from the extensity of exile and return to the intensities of sense of place and belonging across a moving landscape of 20th and 20st century literatures, Jewish and other. It brings together contemporary writers and literary scholars who collectively map these intensities onto a bodily word world in transit and textures of habitable, readable space as passage.
Works by Hélène Cixous, Cécile Wajsbrot, Alex Epstein, Almog Behar, and Svetlana Boym explore sites made up of layers of passages, taking configurations of sayability and readability as forms, poetic and political, of inhabiting the material world. The contributions by literary scholars explore the theoretical potential of a mapping of such sites in studies of modalities of belonging and unbelonging in modern and contemporary works of literature.
The volume collects a collaborative investigation of the exigencies and potentialities of sense of place and belonging through literature, Jewish and other. It offers a literary perspective on current debates in a variety of fields, including literary criticism, human geography, architectural theory, and translation studies.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783110438611
Publisher:	De Gruyter
Publication date:	04/15/2019
Series:	Perspectives on Jewish Texts and Contexts , #7
Pages:	245
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.06(h) x (d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

C. Hilfrich, Hebrew University of Jerusalem; N. Gordinsky, University of Haifa, Israel; S. Zepp, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany.

Table of Contents

Introduction Carola Hilfrich Natasha Gordinsky Susanne Zepp 1

Part 1

Ail! - Il ne faut pas le dire - / Oy! - You Mustn't Say That Hélène Cixous Eric Prenowitz 8

The Depository of Zugehör: Ail! and the Soundscape of Belonging Carola Hilfrich 48

Vous trouverez ce livre … / You'll find this book… Cécile Wajsbrot Susanne Zepp 54

"Vous trouverez ce livre …"-Cécile Wajsbrot and the Art of Belonging Stephanie Bung 58

$$$ / Shortcuts Home; East German China Alex Epstein Becka Mara McKay 66

Smuggled Belongings: Alex Epstein's Fiction of Immigration Natasha Gordinsky 68

$$$ / Ana min al-yahoud-I'm one of the Jews Almog Behar Vivian Eden 74

"The Same Words, Perhaps a Bit More Broken": Multiple Belongings in Almog Behar's "Ana Min al-Yahoud" Yael Kenan 90

Part II

French Scholem, or: Scholem's Purloined Letter Ruth Ginsburg 107

Belonging Destabilized: Anton Shammas's Arabesques Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan 126

Derrida's Appartenances: A Footnote on Language and Belonging Vivian Liska 138

De-essentialized Belonging: Poetics of the Self in Joyce Mansour and Clarice Lispector Susanne Zepp 150

Form and Language: Alejandra Pizarnik's Spatial Poetics of Un/Belonging Anastasia Telaak 169

Architectures of Absence: Nicole Krauss's Novel Great House Sonja Dickow 194

Part III

Introduction to Svetlana Boym's "Remembering Forgetting" Masha Gessen 211

Remembering Forgetting. Tale of a Refugee Camp Svetlana Boym 214

Svetlana Boym Remembers Forgetting Sasha Senderovich 234

Notes on Contributors 236