Between realism and modernism: National narratives in modern Hebrew fiction (Y. Ch. Brenner, S. Y. Agnon, S. Yizhar, Yaakov Shabtai, A. B. Yehoshua)

This dissertation analyzes the coexistence of realist and modernist prose in early and mid-twentieth century Hebrew fictional texts.; The first chapter focuses on Y. Ch. Brenner's 1911 novel, Mi-kan u-mi-kan (From Here and There). On the one hand, this novel engages the specific, pressing ideological questions of the Zionist project at the start of the twentieth century by offering a detailed, realist portrait of Jewish life during the Second Aliyah. On the other hand, the novel also provides an intense elaboration of the interiority of its protagonist, thereby obscuring the chronology and even causality of the realist narrative. In decidedly modernist fashion, this elaboration threatens to undermine the very logic which ties the individual to the collective, as it reveals the fundamental inadequacy of defining individuals primarily through their place in an external, historically specific setting. Yet paradoxically, this incommensurable interiority emerges and evolves in response to the protagonist's failure to realize the imperatives of the collective.; The second chapter addresses S. Y. Agnon's 1945 novel about the Second Aliyah, Tmol Shilshom (Just Yesterday). I demonstrate how Agnon's narrative shifts from a rich panoramic realism into a decidedly modernist thematization of language, in particular Hebrew. Here language, and not the reality it represents, becomes the novel's focus. Agnon's thematization of Hebrew resonates with the novel's larger critique of the Zionist ideology of the second Aliyah. Tmol Shilshom illustrates the myriad ways in which the intended newness of the Zionist project was continually haunted by that which it sought to reject, in an extended treatment of the return of the repressed. The novel's realism satirizes this ideology through its ironic rendering of life in the new Yishuv, where religious impulses, unproductiveness, and a longing for the diaspora still reign. The metalingual modernism of the novel employs the same mechanism but focuses on the deeper level of language. Agnon's thematization of language in Tmol Shilshom addresses the project of secularizing Hebrew, through the enactment of a return of a repressed sacred Hebrew. Overall, the novel's many layers offer a fascinating opportunity to reexamine Benedict Anderson's theory on the interdependence of the novel and nation in general, by comparing it to Tmol Shilshom's treatment of the relationship between Hebrew realism and the Zionist project in particular.; The third chapter treats a series of stories by S. Yizhar written during and immediately following Israel's War of Independence. These stories' seemingly straightforward realist depictions of abuses of power and their associated moral dilemmas are often read as the earliest signs of protest in Hebrew literature over the Israeli treatment of indigenous Palestinian Arabs. Yet these events are narrated through an unusual, subtle conflation of typically distinct perspectives: witness narrators suddenly become active agents; first person point of view instantaneously shifts into third and even second person, all of which occasionally and unannounced transform into a collective perspective. Yizhar's experiments with perspective raise fundamental questions of identity, agency, reliability and the relationship of the individual to the collective, questions which require a rethinking of his apparently one-dimensional critique of Israeli actions during the war. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)...