Borders, Territories, and Ethics: Hebrew Literature in the Shadow of the Intifada

by Adia Mendelson-Maoz

Overview

Borders, Territories, and Ethics: Hebrew Literature in the Shadow of the Intifada presents a new perspective on the multifaceted relations between ideologies, space, and ethics manifested in contemporary Hebrew literature dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the occupation.

In this volume, Mendelson-Maoz analyzes Israeli prose written between 1987 and 2007, relating mainly to the first and second intifadas, written by well-known authors such as Yehoshua, Grossman, Matalon, Castel-Bloom, Govrin, Kravitz, and Levy. Mendelson-Maoz raises critical questions regarding militarism, humanism, the nature of the State of Israel as a democracy, national identity and its borders, soldiers as moral individuals, the nature of Zionist education, the acknowledgment of the Other, and the sovereignty of the subject. She discusses these issues within two frameworks. The first draws on theories of ethics in the humanist tradition and its critical extensions, especially by Levinas. The second applies theories of space, and in particular deterritorialization as put forward by Deleuze and Guattari and their successors.

Overall this volume provides an innovative theoretical analysis of the collage of voices and artistic directions in contemporary Israeli prose written in times of political and cultural debate on the occupation and its intifadas.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781557538208
Publisher:	Purdue University Press
Publication date:	08/15/2018
Series:	Shofar Supplements in Jewish Studies Series
Pages:	252
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Adia Mendelson-Maoz is an associate professor of Israeli literature and culture, and the chair of the Department of Literature, Language and the Arts at the Open University of Israel. She specializes in the multifaceted relationships between literature, ethics, politics, and culture, mainly in the context of Hebrew literature and Israeli culture. She is the author of two books, Literature as a Moral Laboratory: Reading Selected 20th-Century Hebrew Prose, published in Hebrew in 2009 by Bar Ilan University Press, and Multiculturalism in Israel: Literary Perspectives, published in 2014 by Purdue University Press. She has authored numerous articles in books and journals, including Social Jewish Studies; PHILOSOPHIA; Shofar; Social Identities; the Journal of Literary Theory; Israel Studies Review; the Journal of Narrative Theory; and Women Studies.