This Year in Jerusalem: Israel and the Literary Quest for Jewish Authenticity

Abstract

This dissertation investigates how Israel is imagined as a literary space and setting in contemporary literature. Israel is a specific place with delineated borders, and is also networked to a whole galaxy of conversations where authenticity plays a crucial role. Israel generates authenticity in uniquely powerful ways because of its location at the nexus of the imagined and the concrete. While much attention has been paid to Israel as a political and ethnographic/ demographic subject, its appearance on the map of literary spaces has been less thoroughly considered. Ultimately, I suggest that even at the most granular level of description and analysis, Israel is always a partly imagined space, saturated with signification. By using Israel as a case study and uniting critical discourses on literary space and cultural authenticity, this project argues for a central role for literature in the consideration of contemporary hot-button issues across politics and identity.