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The Poetics of Revival and Mourning: M.Y. Berdichevsky Between the Dead and the Living

Sun, December 16, 10:00 to 11:30am, Seaport Hotel & World Trade Center, Skyline Room

Abstract

Hebrew revival literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, which has often been framed as a literary renaissance, is defined as such due to its particular affinity for life and its engagement with the mission of national, cultural and linguistic revitalization. Yet, an attentive reading of major revival texts shows that the poetics of revival is embedded in a terminology of pain, mourning and melancholia, and that revival literature is infatuated with morbid, or otherwise non-living figures. Golems, specters, puppets, and ventriloquized mutes inhabit the discursive realm of revival and remerge throughout its reflective discussions. In M.Y. Berdichevsky’s work, the fascination with the world of the dead, as well as the poetic model of “the tear in the heart” which manifests the experience of a subject torn between contradictory ends, give rise to a superfluous poetic speech that takes the form of mourning and lamentation. Drawing on the work of literary scholar Marc Nichanian, who defines the emerging fields of nineteenth-century philology and national literature as institutions of mourning, this paper argues that Hebrew revival literature mourns what it simultaneously constitutes as living-dead. This ongoing lamentation generates and sustains its superfluous literary discourse and its poetic and ideological force. But since the lost object is never fully dead, revival is always also melancholic. Insofar as mourning is sung and uttered, it is never fully concluded; rather it maintains and performs the process of mourning, while already perceiving the living-dead as implicated in the lamenting “self.”

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