Signatures of Struggle

<p><b>A Marxist history of Israeli literature tracing the relations between economic social and aesthetic transformations.</b></p><p><i>Signatures of Struggle</i> offers a unique perspective on Israeli literature bringing Marxist cultural critique to bear on a field from which it has hitherto been absent. Oded Nir moves beyond the dominant interpretive horizon of Israeli literary criticism: the relation of literature to national ideology. Rather than reproducing the usual narrative in which fiction resists the nation's goals Nir demonstrates how in each historical moment literary engagement with national ideology is a means to think through social tensions or contradictions internal to Israeli society-to solve in imagination problems that threaten the social order. Focusing on moments of transformation Nir argues that the 1950s crisis of realism was the result of the failure rather than the success of the collective transformative project of the <i>haluzim</i> the settler vanguard of Zionism. In the 1980s the postmodern turn expressed a crisis of social imagination whose origin was the incorporation of Palestinians into the Israeli economy after the 1967 war. Finally he shows that the ways in which history is imaginatively reworked in contemporary Israeli fiction can only be understood through the context of 1950s and 1980s literature. Authors analyzed include Yigal Mossinsohn Nathan Shaham Hanoch Bartov Yehudit Hendel Orly Castel-Bloom Yehudit Katzir David Grossman Yehoshua Kenaz and Batya Gur.</p>