Inconvenient Gnessin: Languages of Subjectivity and Death (Hebrew)

Session Submission Type: Panel Session

Abstract

This panel is dedicated to new readings of one of the most unique voices in early Hebrew modernism, Uri Nissan Gnessin (1879-1913). Despite his short life and relatively modest oeuvre, his distinct literary imagination continues to haunt and resonate in the Hebrew republic of letters. One of the reasons for this ongoing hermeneutic investment, we argue, is Gnessin’s philosophical perception of contemporaneity. Gnessin’s aesthetic project of being “to the side” of dominant paths of modernism charged his writings with poetic and epistemological potentials that can unfold in relation to different times and cultural contexts.
Teasing out this hermeneutic potentiality, the aim of our panel is to offer new theoretical directions for reading Gnessin beyond the paradigm of national literature. While engaging in careful close readings of his intricate texts, we also present Gnessin’s fiction as an important case study for Jewish modernist literature writ large. Our readings explore four philosophical and existential interrelated issues that run through his entire work: language, intersubjectivity, gender, and death. Inspired by an ongoing dialogue between the members of the panel and the chair, our papers thus seek to position Gnessin’s poetics along a new theoretical continuum: Natasha Gordinsky introduces Mikhail’s Bakhtin’s concept of heteroglossia in order to grasp Gnessin’s ambitious project of imagining Hebrew language as spoken and vernacular language. Through the feminist Bakhtinian analyses of his first published story “Zhenya,” she situates Gnessin both historically and poetically in relation to two versions of Jewish modernity in Russian Empire. Eyal Bassan’s paper mobilizes the philosophical notion of the “inconvenience of other people,” developed by Lauren Berlant, as a way to examine alternative modes of intersubjective relationality in Gnessin’s world; by drawing attention to the fabric of the ordinary in Gnessin’s fiction, the paper proposes a new account of the rise of Hebrew modernity out of the spirit of affective inconvenience. Michael Gluzman’s contribution asks what happens when death ceases to be an event and becomes a mode of being; focusing on Gnessin’s last novella “Etsel,” it explores his refined stylistics as an experimental attempt to describe an epistemology of death and of dying.

Sub Unit

• Modern Hebrew Literature

Chair

• Allison Schachter, Vanderbilt University

Individual Presentations

• Hebrew as Heteroglossia: Uri Nissan Gnessin’s First Poetic Attempt - Nataliya Natasha Gordinskaya, University of Haifa

• Gnessin’s Loose Attachments: Affective Inconvenience and Hebrew Modernity - Eyal Bassan, University of Haifa

• Death in Quotation Marks - Michael Gluzman, Tel Aviv University and Yad-Yitzhak Ben-Zvi

Zoom Host

• Zoom Host 08