| My dissertation, Prosaic Conditions: Writing in the Modern Mode from Hegel to Bialik, investigates the terms prose and the prosaic as metaphors of modern political and cultural conditions, and as indices of the epistemological transformations and aesthetic sensibilities that form them. Focusing on this complex figure---which denotes both a literary mode (prose as a type of text) and a modality (the prosaic, the mundane, the contingent)---I retrace the history of German-Jewish, German-Zionist and Hebrew literature, emphasizing the interconnectedness of these fields, and their roots in German philosophy. The phrase "prosaic conditions" comes from Hegel's Lectures on Aesthetics (delivered in the 1820's), the focus of my first chapter, in which I identify the themes central for the argument: state and society in modernity, the language of the law as the prototypical case of prose, and the 'world' as a constructed, demystified, man-made space. As Heinrich Heine, the protagonist of my second chapter, shows in his Reisebilder (1826-1831), prose differs from earlier literary modes in that it cannot pragmatically rely on an existing space in its sense-making, it has neither a real nor an implied stage on which to appear, and therefore it must first describe and construct spaces before it can inhabit them; his travel writing is an experiment with the conditions of writing prose, a tool through which to explore and expose 'prosaic conditions.' The third chapter examines Theodor Herzl's Zionist utopia Altneuland (1902) through the prism of his widely neglected early literary work and unpublished manuscripts, showing that Herzl's interest in genre, and in particular in the tension between prose and performance, was formed by his dialogue with Heine. In the fourth chapter I contrast Herzl's political Zionism, wherein novelistic prose was used as a technology for the fashioning of the space of the projected Jewish state, with the cultural Zionism of Haim Nahman Bialik, centering on the long narrative poem City of Slaughter (1903) and its relation to Bialik's essays on Jewish law, prose and the novel. |
