Trapped in language: Nation, space, and subject in Hebrew literature, Hebrew literary criticism, and Jewish national ideologies

This dissertation is a study of the rhetorical interaction between Hebrew literature, Hebrew literary criticism, and Zionist political writings. Focusing on key terms of Zionist discourses, the dissertation explores formal contradictions within the Zionist subject through a close reading not only of literary but of critical and ideological texts as well. Rather than attempting to construct historical narratives of modern Hebrew literature, Hebrew criticism, and Zionist discourses, I sample three "moments" within the history of the Jewish national discourses. The first moment roughly corresponds with the earliest years of an organized Jewish national movement, from the writing of Ahad Ha-Am in the late 1890s to the literary criticism of Y. H. Brenner in the early 1910s, with Moshe Smilansky's short story "Khawaja Nazar" completing the triangle. The three terms at the focus of my discussion are territory, language, and truth. The second moment corresponds to the high point in the implementation of Zionist discourses in Palestine from the early 1920 to the establishment of the State of Israel in the late 1940s. In the second chapter I thus read Moshe Shamir's novel He Walked in the Fields alongside the ideological essays of David Ben-Gurion and Meir Ya'ari, and the literary criticism of such critics as David Kna'ani, Shelomo Zemach, and Gershon Shaked. In my readings, I focus on the articulation of history and myth as conflicting, yet complementary terms. The last moment corresponds to the decline of Social-Zionist discourses from the late 1960s on. Thus, in Chapter 3 I examine the ideological essays of A. B. Yehoshua and Amos Oz, in Chapter 4 Ya'akov Shabtai's novel Past Continuous, and in Chapter 5 the critical project of Dan Miron. In these chapters I examine the formation of identity as a site of anxiety that corresponds to the political decline of the Labor Movement as well as to the challenge of the Palestinian presence in the Occupied Territories. The juxtaposition of the three "modes of discourse" uncovers contradictory trends at the center of some of the seemingly strictest ideological expressions and further underscores the crucial role literary criticism plays in the construction of national space, culture and subject.