Winter 2018
Fifth Issue, Winter 2018
Publish Date: March 2018
Series Editor: Yigal Schwartz
Guest Editor: Dekel Shay Schory
Editorial Board: Eitan Bar-Yosef, Hanna Soker-Schwager,
Anat Weisman
Editorial Assistant: Yaara Keren
This issue is based on the conference Keret's Happy Campers: Etgar Keret and the Fate of Israeli Culture in the World Today, which was held at the Chicago Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Chicago in 2015. The conference was initiated and organized by Prof. Na'ama Rokem from the University of Chicago and Prof. Yigal Schwartz, Director of Heksherim: The Research Institute for Jewish and Israeli Literature and Culture at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.
In the opening article, Christopher Merrill shares his thoughts regarding Keret's prose in light of his personal and literary acquaintance with the author. Yigal Schwartz, from a panoramic perspective, discusses two main poetic and philosophical moves that characterize Keret's entire artistic oeuvre: “mechanical reproduction" and the “random" deviation from it.
Three of the articles offer a broad perspective on Keret's work. Takafumi Akimotocompares the way Etgar Keret's work is read in Japan with the way Haruki Murakami is read outside of it, and from that perspective offers thoughts regarding world literature, translation, and literature studies. Keret's humor is the focus ofRoman Katsman's article, in which he analyzes Keret's humor and argues that the "explosion of the banal" is at its core. Adia Mendelson-Maoz discusses Keret's image of Jewish masculinity and particularly his shaping of the figure of the living dead, with which he confronts both Diaspora and Zionist myths.
Nurit Buchweitz reads The Seven Good Years, demonstrating how it can be read as a memoir that centers on the birth of a writer, as a self-reflexive work in which the author addresses his own writing in behind-the-scenes episodes, and as a script that provides a key to understanding Keret's poetics. Finally,Michal Peles Almagor and Dekel Shay Schoryoffer two very different interpretations of the same story, “Lieland," demonstrating the depth and complexity of Keret's work.
Full articles:
Christopher Merril - Parallel Universes: the World of Etgar Keret
Christopher Merrill has published six collections of poetry, including Watch Fire, for which he received the Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets; many edited volumes and translations; and six books of nonfiction, among them, Only the Nails Remain: Scenes from the Balkan Wars, Things of the Hidden God: Journey to the Holy Mountain, The Tree of the Doves: Ceremony, Expedition, War, and Self-Portrait with Dogwood. His writings have been translated into nearly forty languages; his journalism appears widely; his honors include a Chevalier from the French government in the Order of Arts and Letters. As director of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, Merrill has conducted cultural diplomacy missions to more than fifty countries. He serves on the U.S. National Commission for UNESCO, and in April 2012 President Obama appointed him to the National Council on the Humanities.
Yigal Schwartz - "A Story or a Bullet Between the Eyes" Etgar Keret: Repetitiveness, Morality and Postmodernism
Yigal Schwartz is a Full Professor in the Department of Hebrew Literature at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU), the director of Heksherim Research Institute for Jewish and Israeli Literature and Culture. He has published thirteen books of research, a research autobiographical novel, and dozens of articles that have been translated into ten languages. He has also edited more than two hundred and fifty books—research works, prose, poetry, and drama—mainly in the framework of his position as senior editor at Keter Publishing House and at the Kinneret Zmora Bitan publishing house. He was the Senior Editor of 'Massa Critit' (Critical Mass), a series of research books published by Heksherim Institute and Kinneret Zmora Bitan publishing house, and co-adds 'Ruach Tzad' (Side Wind) a series of prose books in which unique and new voices of Hebrew writers are being heard, alongside Hebrew manuscripts that had not been published or Hebrew books that had gone out of production.
His latest publications include 'Lamenter in Leopard-Print Pants: The Narrative Art of Zeruya Shalev (with Shai Zur and Nufar Rashkes), Ben-Gurion University and Miskal, 2017 (Hebrew), and Story and History: History, Biography and Literature, Dvir, 2017 (Hebrew).
heksher@bgu.ac.il
Takafumi Akimoto - Etgar Keret, Haruki Murakami and World Literature: the Possibility of Translation
Takafumi Akimoto is a professor at Konan University, Faculty of Letters, Department of English, in Japan.
His research field is American Literature, particularly contemporary fiction. He has finished the doctorate program at Keio University. He is the translator of Etgar Keret's The Seven Good Years into Japanese, which was shortlisted for the Best Translation Award in Japan in 2017. His first book, which investigates the relationship between the changes of American paper currency system and the imagination in the contemporary American fictional works, will be published in 2018 (Japanese).
akimoto@center.konan-u.ac.jp
Nurit Buchweitz - The Seven Good Years as Etgar Keret's Rosetta Stone
Prof. Nurit Buchweitz earned her Ph.D in comparative literature at Tel Aviv University. Since 2015 she is Dean of the Faculty of Society and Culture at Beit Berl College and was Chair of the Department of Hebrew and Comparative literature between 2008-2013.
Her research areas are postmodernism – poetics and theory, post-humanism and 21st century writing, late-modernist Israeli poetry, the poetics of Meir Wiezeltier, the poetics of Michel Houellebecq. Prof. Buchweitz's recent books are An Officer of Civilization: The Poetics of Michel Houellebecq (Peter Lang 2015) and Intimate Relationships in Cinema, Literature and Visual Culture (Palgrave Macmillan 2017, co-edited volume).
nuritb@beitberl.ac.il
Adia Mendelson-Maoz - Keret's "Living–Dead" and the Sacrifice of Israeli Masculinity
Adia Mendelson-Maoz is an associate professor in Israeli literature and culture at the Open University of Israel.
She investigates the multifaceted relationships between literature, ethics, politics, and culture, mainly in the context of Hebrew Literature and Israeli culture. Her latest book, Multiculturalism in Israel – Literary Perspectives, has been published in 2014 by Purdue UP. She has published numerous articles in books and journals, among them Social Jewish Studies; PHILOSOPHIA; Shofar; Social Identities; JLT-Journal of Literary Theory; Israel Studies Review; and Women Studies.
adiamen@openu.ac.il
http://www.openu.ac.il/Personal_sites/adia-mendelson-maoz/
Roman Katsman - Stam: The Unbearable Lightness of Banality, or on the Nature of Etgar Keret’s Humor
Prof. Roman Katsman lives in Israel since 1990, and since 2000 he teaches at the Department of Literature of the Jewish People in Bar-Ilan University.
His main scientific interests include modern Hebrew and Russian literatures, theory and poetics. Among his books—Nostalgia for a Foreign Land: Studies in Russian-Language Literature in Israel (2016), Literature, History, Choice: The Principle of Alternative History in Literature (2013), 'A Small Prophecy': Sincerity and Rhetoric in The City with All That Is Therein by S.Y. Agnon (2013, in Hebrew), At the Other End of Gesture. Anthropological Poetics of Gesture in Modern Hebrew Literature (2008), Poetics of Becoming: Dynamic Processes of Mythopoesis in Modern and Postmodern Hebrew and Slavic Literature (2005).
roman.katsman@biu.ac.il
Michal Peles-Almagor - "Here" Is a Different Place: "Lieland", Speech and Hebrew Literary Space
Michal Peles-Almagor is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago.
She is currently working on her dissertation, "The Place of Writing: Language and Home in Twentieth Century Hebrew and German Literature." Her research interests include the novel, Hebrew and German modernisms, diaspora studies, critical theory, and modern drama. Her recent article on Nissim Aloni was published in the journal Hateatron (2012). She translates plays and teaches literature and theater at the University of Chicago.
michalpeles@gmail.com
Dekel S. Schory - Etgar Keret on Lying: Three Examples
Dekel S. Schory is a doctoral candidate at the department of Hebrew literature at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.
Her dissertation title is To live and write in a linguistic exile: Jewish writers in the German-speaking sphere and their linguistic selections (1930-1900). Schory Holds a BA from Tel Aviv University (Hebrew Literature and Linguistics), and a MA diploma with honors from Ben-Gurion University, (Hebrew Literature). The MA thesis studied the work of G. Shoffman and was awarded with the Gershon Shaked prize (2014). Schory is a co-editor of 'Ruach Tzad' (Side Wind) a series of prose books, with Yigal Schwartz and Moria Dayan Codish.
dekelshay@gmail.com
