Publications

Skirting the Ethical
Carol Jacobs
Publication Year: 2008
Description:

Readings of six works, each noted for its politico-ethical stance. The first four (Sophocles’ Antigone, Plato’s Symposium and Republic Hamann’s “Aesthetica in nuce” have a recognized place in the canon. The last two, Sebald’s The Emigrants and Jane Campion’s The Piano are exemplary for our contemporary scene.  The straight-forward assumptions about justice, divine and state power, the good, and identity politics that every reader or viewer inevitably comes upon are disrupted when one takes into account the role of language. What emerges is a non-prescriptive ethics of another order.

Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life
Martin Hägglund
Publication Year: 2008
Description:

Radical Atheism presents a profound new reading of the influential French philosopher Jacques Derrida. Against the prevalent notion that there was an ethical or religious “turn” in Derrida’s thinking, Hägglund argues that a radical atheism informs Derrida’s work from beginning to end. Proceeding from Derrida’s insight into the constitution of time, Hägglund demonstrates how Derrida rethinks the condition of identity, ethics, religion, and political emancipation in accordance with the logic of radical atheism. Hägglund challenges other major interpreters of Derrida’s work and offers a compelling account of Derrida’s thinking on life and death, good and evil, self and other.

From the Beginning: Three Essays on Nativist Hebrew Poetry
Hannan Hever
Publication Year: 2008
Description:

Nativist Hebrew poetry written in the twentieth century in Eretz Israel and in the State of Israel took upon itself a central role in realizing, through culture, the Zionist national project of settling the territory and establishing a national identity. The journey to implementing the national collective’s goal of inheriting the earth is revealed in the work of Esther Raab, Haim Goury and Moshe Dor not as an  unquestioned flow, natural and free, but rather as an attempt by these nativist national poets to obscure the obstacles and hurdles peppering this quest.

Toward the Longed-for Shore: The Sea in Hebrew Culture and Modern Hebrew Literature
Hannan Hever
Publication Year: 2007
Description:

This book takes a bold step in entirely overturning the most common perspective in the study of Zionist national culture. Instead of looking at the importance, centrality, conquest, and cultivation of the Land of Israel, while altogether ignoring the Mediterranean Sea, this book chooses to turn deliberate on the importance of the sea itself. Instead of putting at its center the territory, the very land of the land of Israel – the book examines the role of the sea in the imagined community of Eretz Israel and the State of Israel. Thus, the book develops an alternative analysis of the national culture even as it detects fractures and discontinuities in the imagined national community.

2007
Hannan Hever
Publication Year: 2007
Description:

Using a wide theoretical perspective, this panoramic, paradigmatic book offers a radical interpretation of the hegemonic historiography of Modern Hebrew literature. Travelling through the main roads through the twentieth century, it introduces a critical examination anchored in Post-Colonial theory and “minority discourse,” undermining the Hebrew canon as well as the Zionist perspective on the history of Hebrew literature. Rejecting a reliance  on the Zionist meta-narrative, the book proposes several literary alternatives to a historiography that does not conform or subvert itself to this meta-narrative.

Reading Poetry: Reviews, Essays and Articles about Hebrew Poetry
Hannan Hever
Publication Year: 2005
Description:

This book is a compilation of a selection of Hannan Hever’s essays, articles, and reviews about Hebrew poetry published over thirty years. They deal with the poetry of, among others, Yaakov Fichman; Yocheved Bat-Myriam; Nathan Alterman; Ezra Zusman; Shimon Helkin; Avraham Huss and Pinchas Sade, together with younger poets such as Nathan Zach; Meir Wiezeltier; Harold Schimel; Oded Peled; Yitzhak Laor; Maya Bezerano and Galit Hazan-Rokem.

Other articles are broader studies of, for example, the beginnings of modern Hebrew poetry; the poetry of the Lebanon War; Hebrew women’s poetry; and Israeli poetry written in the wake of the war of ‘73.

 

Popular Front Paris and the Poetics of Culture
Dudley Andrew
Publication Year: 2005
Description:

A analysis on the decade of the 1930s in the form of a newspaper, with sections treating simultaneous happenings in politics (the Stavisky affair), entertainment (music halls), literature (Celine and Malraux), travel (colonialism),fashion (photography),spectacles (expositions, cinema), and so on. Key films open each section and provide an iconography and themes. This book argues for a new historiography of periods.

Love and the Law in Cervantes
Roberto González Echevarría
Publication Year: 2005
Description:

The consolidation of law and the development of legal writing during Spain’s Golden Age not only helped that country become a modern state but also affected its great literature. In this fascinating book, Roberto González Echevarría explores the works of Cervantes, showing how his representations of love were inspired by examples of human deviance and desire culled from legal discourse. González Echevarría describes Spain’s new legal policies, legislation, and institutions and explains how, at the same time, its literature became filled with love stories derived from classical and medieval sources.

In the City of Slaughter – A Visit at Twilight, Bialik’s Poem A Century After
Hannan Hever
Publication Year: 2005
Description:

In Hebrew poetry, steeped in the communal, there is no work more classic than “In the City of Slaughter” (1903), H.N. Bialik’s work of poetic rhetoric and historical influence of immense magnitude. Its role in establishing the national Zionist ethos that is at the core of Israeli cultural identity to this day is enormous.

Failure, Nationalism, and Literature: The Making of Modern Chinese Identity, 1895-1937
Jing Tsu
Publication Year: 2005
Description:

How often do we think of cultural humiliation and failure as strengths? Against prevailing views on what it means to enjoy power as individuals, cultures, or nations, this provocative book looks at the making of cultural and national identities in modern China as building success on failure. It reveals the exercise of sovereign power where we least expect it and shows how this is crucial to our understanding of a modern world of conflict, violence, passionate suffering, and cultural difference.

Beautiful Motherland of Death, Aesthetic and Politics in Uri Zvi Greenberg’s Poetry
Hannan Hever
Publication Year: 2004
Description:

This book presents a series of surprising encounters with the poetry of Uri Zvi Greenberg, one of the great Hebrew poets of the twentieth century, and its multifaceted presence on the seam between the politic and the aesthetic. This book’s suggested readings of Greenberg’s oeuvre exposing how, through his radical fascist perspective, he created astoundingly impressive work in its width and breadth while developing, unexpectedly through Hebrew culture’s radical right wing perspective, a powerful stance representing and containing the totality of modern day Jewish existence.

Cervantes’s Novel of Modern Times: A New Reading of Don Quijote
David Quint
Publication Year: 2003
Description:

The book demonstrates the unity of Don Quijote, organized through the technique of interlace. The novel’s episodes and interpolated stories mirror and comment on one another in a carefully constructed design that describes the historical transition from feudal society to a world of money and nascent capitalism.