SEMINAR: Archiving Modern Hebrew Literature, Part 1

Session Submission Type: Seminar

Abstract

This two-day seminar will examine and contextualize the status of the archive in modern Hebrew literary scholarship through specific case studies and archival practices. Participants will address the ethics of using unpublished, unfinished literary work; “archive fever” and the limits of discovery; issues and problems of access; the (real or imagined) authority of archival texts; and the relation between the archive and authorial reception. Discussion will consider how material is collected and recollected by individual scholars and how archival access and practices have shaped the public reception of modern Hebrew literature. Taking cues from Virginia Woolf’s essay “The Lives of the Obscure,” Tamar S. Hess will consider how to approach, sift through and make sense of a corpus of approximately one hundred twentieth century Hebrew autobiographies in the National Library of Israel collection. Adriana X. Jacobs will explore the relation between access and reception in the digitization of archival material, taking a close look at the archives of the poet Esther Raab. Barbara Mann will examine how attention to Leah Goldberg’s visual work, especially her collages, asks us to reconsider her written oeuvre. Lilach Nethanel will present David Vogel’s manuscript Viennese Romance and Zalman Shneour’s personal correspondence as case studies of the intermediate position (written but unpublished) of the archived manuscript and the demands that it places on a scholar. Na’ama Rokem will draw from the archives of Leah Goldberg and Ludwig Strauss to discuss the formation of the Department of Comparative Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Allison Schachter will talk about the conditions of the archive, what it means to open crumbling pages and see rusted metal paperclips. She’ll interrogate both the impulse to preserve and the very failures of preservation. Giddon Ticotsky will propose a reading of the modern Hebrew literary archive as “the road not taken,” focusing on alternative versions of canonical texts that hide in the archive. Using material collected and housed at the Kibbutz Degania archive, Sunny Yudkoff will reconstruct the events leading up to a libel suit connected to the legacy of the poet Rachel Bluvshteyn to reveal new ways in which Rachel’s illness, and the cultural reputation attending it, inflected her posthumous reception well into the 1980s.

Sub Unit

• Modern Hebrew Literature

Chair

• Adriana X. Jacobs, University of Oxford

Discussants

• Adriana X. Jacobs, University of Oxford

• Barbara E. Mann, The Jewish Theological Seminary

• Allison Hope Schachter, Vanderbilt University

• Lilach Nethanel, Bar-Ilan University

• Giddon Ticotsky, Stanford University

• Sunny Yudkoff, Harvard University

• Tamar S. Hess, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

• Naama Rokem, University of Chicago