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Concrete dreaming : national subjects and narrative disruption in contemporary Israeli autobiography
Version 2 2017-10-10, 05:40
Version 1 2016-12-05, 04:07
thesis
posted on 2017-10-10, 05:40 authored by Rubinstein, Keren TovaThis Creative Writing PhD comes in two parts. The first part is the Thesis,
my autobiography about migration from Israel to Australia as a teenage girl whose
adult experiences helped to shape an ambivalent national identity. It is also a story
about the difficulty in articulating one's life with the conflicting narratives that make
up a shared past. This ongoing challenge is apparent on the level of family, society
and nation in this life narrative. This memoir is also an attempt to distill and
comprehend my Israeli and Jewish identities. The verbal text is structured as
nonlinear passages and is accompanied by graphic illustrations and photographs that
conjure private and collective memory and representation. The second part or
Exegesis is intended to situate and contextualize the Thesis. In this accompanying
study I examine five contemporary Israeli autobiographies and the way in which they
contest the dominant national narrative. I divide these works into those coming from
the center and peripheries of Israeli society; the latter are unlikely to offer
representative national subjects as defined by the country's founding ideology. The
frrst chapter's focus is two minority autobiographies: Anton Shammas' s Arabesques
(1986) and Lea Aini' s Rose of Lebanon (2009). The second chapter will examine
three works from central, hegemonic or potentially privileged narrators: Amos Oz's
A Tale of Love and Darkness (2002), Avraham Balaban's Mourning a Father Lost: a
Kibbutz Childhood Remembered (2004) and Yitzhak Ben-Ner's Nobody's Ever Died
Walking (2007). I argue that contemporary Israeli autobiography is a genre in which
contestations of national ideology are common. I further maintain that the
autobiographical boom is symptomatic of the country's diminished collective
identification. Both central and marginal autobiographies will be shown to disrupt
the dominant ideology of the Jewish state and to offer alternative narratives of Israeli
subjectivity.
History
Principal supervisor
Garrett LeahAdditional supervisor 1
Barbara CaineAdditional supervisor 2
Fania Oz-SalzbergerYear of Award
2010Department, School or Centre
School of Philosophical, Historical & International StudiesCourse
Doctor of PhilosophyDegree Type
DOCTORATEFaculty
Faculty of ArtsUsage metrics
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