| Popis: |
This article addresses a conceptual difficulty in recent post-Zionist accounts of the "center" of Hebrew literature in the 1930s. These accounts claim that this "center," often personified by the poet Abraham Shlonsky, pursued a poetics of literary complexity and abundance which was linked to a socialist-Zionist outlook. This "center," as these depictions maintain, actively marginalized an alternative poetics of simplicity and directness, a poetics claimed to represent a non-socialist-Zionist outlook. The article proposes that the style of complexity and abundance cannot explain or even adequately describe the literary map of center-periphery of the 1930s. After considering various possible reasons for Shlonsky's centrality, an explanation is provided which focuses on the way his poetry forged a radical, modernist transformation of Jewish tradition. This poetics corresponds to and echoes the Zionist project of the 1930s. Hence, the centrality of Shlonsky's work at that time. |
