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" National Heroism, Popular Pleasure: Violence and the Grotesque in Hebrew and Yiddish Literatures "
Masel, Roni
Estraikh, Gennady
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Latin Dissertation
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| Language of Document
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English
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| Record Number
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1054900
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| Doc. No
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TL54017
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| Main Entry
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Masel, Roni
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| Title & Author
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National Heroism, Popular Pleasure: Violence and the Grotesque in Hebrew and Yiddish Literatures\ Masel, RoniEstraikh, Gennady
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| College
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New York University
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| Date
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2020
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| Degree
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Ph.D.
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2020
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| Note
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276 p.
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| Abstract
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National Heroism, Popular Pleasure elaborates a new mode of writing the historiography of Hebrew and Yiddish literatures. It does so by examining literary works about anti-Jewish violence, and interrogating the function that graphic depictions of brutality play in texts from the late-19th and early-20th centuries. Against the historiographical convention to narrate the history of both literatures from a national point of view, and thus to view literary violence as a textual device in service of Jewish ideological movements, I consider overlooked readerly principles of pleasure, anxiety, and disgust, forgoing an ideological, teleological analysis. I offer a new view of late-19th century Hebrew verse, and read representations of brutality in the early poetry of Isaac Leib Peretz and his contemporary, “Ḥibbat Tsiyon” poets as sites of textual disruption, where popular and “illegitimate” contents, e.g. sex and the grotesque, find their expression in canonic culture. Similarly, I show how Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik’s most canonic Hebrew poem, “In the City of Killing,” provoked among its readers a variety of responses, spanning theology, piety, sentimentalism, and modernist literary sensibilities. Mostly neglected by critics, these reactions demand a renewed appreciation of the poem’s historical effect at its time of publication. The study then tends to the poem’s material remnants, and traces the perplexing bibliographical genealogy of its two Yiddish translations. That contested genealogy, I argue, demonstrates how Hebrew and Yiddish literatures at the turn of the century were anchored in moments of rupture and devastation, and thus refuse to fold back into a unified, national meta-narrative. As such, they lend themselves to non-linear and indecisive interpretations, allowing us to recuperate the suppressed intimacy between Hebrew and Yiddish. Rather than shy away from such indecisiveness, this study suggests that we linger precisely on moments of material, textual, and physical destruction, from which we may hope to find new ways to narrate the joint history of Hebrew and Yiddish literatures in Central and Eastern Europe around the turn of the century.
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| Descriptor
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Comparative literature
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East European studies
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Judaic studies
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Estraikh, Gennady
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New York University
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