ESHEL, Amir, Futurity: contemporary literature and the quest for the past, Chicago, London, The University of Chicago Press, 2013.
Présentation de l'éditeur
When looking at how trauma is represented in literature and the arts, we tend to focus on the weight of the past. In this book, Amir Eshel suggests that this retrospective gaze has trapped us in a search for reason in the madness of the twentieth century’s catastrophes at the expense of literature’s prospective vision. Considering several key literary works, Eshel argues in Futurity that by grappling with watershed events of modernity, these works display a future-centric engagement with the past that opens up the present to new political, cultural, and ethical possibilities—what he calls futurity.
Bringing together postwar German, Israeli, and Anglo-American literature, Eshel traces a shared trajectory of futurity in world literature. He begins by examining German works of fiction and the debates they spurred over the future character of Germany’s public sphere. Turning to literary works by Jewish-Israeli writers as they revisit Israel’s political birth, he shows how these stories inspired a powerful reconsideration of Israel’s identity. Eshel then discusses post-1989 literature—from Ian McEwan’s Black Dogs to J. M. Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year—revealing how these books turn to events like World War II and the Iraq War not simply to make sense of the past but to contemplate the political and intellectual horizon that emerged after 1989. Bringing to light how reflections on the past create tools for the future, Futurity reminds us of the numerous possibilities literature holds for grappling with the challenges of both today and tomorrow
Sommaire
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Spelling out Futurity
Writing Points to What Is “Open, Future, Possible”
Futurity
The Gigantic Shadows That Futurity Casts upon the Present
Metaphors, Themes, and Plots as Causes
Prospection, or the Practical Past
Limitations
Beyond Symptomatic Reading
After “the Romance of World History”
1989 and Contemporary Literature
On the “Wholesale Liquidation of Futurity”
“The Insertion of Man”
A Literary Anthropology of the Contemporary
Part One Coming to Terms with the Future: German Literature in Search of the Past
1 Between Retrospection and Prospection
It’s about Us and Our Future: The 2006 Günter Grass Affair
Literature, Expansion, and Becoming
Symptomatic Reading and Moralism
Toward a Practical Past
2 Günter Grass: “Nothing Is Pure”
“Once Upon a Time” as the Immediate Present: Günter Grass, The Tin Drum
“But Even Soap Cannot Wash Pure”: Günter Grass, Dog Years
The Hereditary Guilt: Günter Grass, My Century and Crabwalk
Memory as Hide-and-Seek: Günter Grass, Peeling the Onion
3 Alexander Kluge: Literature as Orientation
“What Can I Count On? How Can I Protect Myself?”
“Worn Out”: Alexander Kluge, “The Air Raid on Halberstadt on April 8, 1945”
On the Meaning of Care in Dark Times: Alexander Kluge, “Heidegger in the Crimea”
Literature and the Capacity for Differentiating
4 Martin Walser: Imagination and the Culture of Dissensus
Resisting the Norms of Public Remembrance: Martin Walser, A Gushing Fountain
Dissensus
“A Clear Conscience Is No Conscience at All”: The Walser-Bubis Debate Reconsidered
5 The Past as Gift
A New Language for Remembrance
“No More Past!”: Hans-Ulrich Treichel, Lost and Human Flight
The Gift of Geschichte: Norbert Gstrein, The English Years
Endowing the Past with New Meanings: Bernhard Schlink, The Reader
On Giving: Katharina Hacker, A Kind of Love, and W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz
The Paradoxical Achievement
Part Two Writing the Unsaid: Hebrew Literature and the Question of Palestinian Flight and Expulsion
6 The Unsaid
Zeitschichten
The Unsaid
Loyalist Literature?
Sentinel for the House of Israel
7 The Silence of the Villages: S. Yizhar’s Early War Writing
The Great Jewish Soul: S. Yizhar, The Story of Khirbet Khizeh
The Idealist Motivation
The Trucks of Exile
A Recurrent Light of Terror on the Bare Facts of Our Existence
Falcons over New Villages: S. Yizhar, “A Story That Did Not Yet Begin”
8 “Then, Suddenly—Fire”: A. B. Yehoshua’s Facing the Forests
Exploring the Dark Matter
To Remember One’s Own Name
The Day of Judgment
The Afterlife of the Burnt Forest
9 “A Land That Devours Its Inhabitants. Its Lovers Devour Its Lovers”
A New Generation
“Something Horrible Happened There”: David Schütz, White Rose, Red Rose
On Being Awfully Strong: Yehoshua Kenaz, Infiltration
Struggling with the Nazi Beast: David Grossman, See Under: Love
To Enter the Shared Space, to Begin: David Grossman, The Yellow Wind and Sleeping on a Wire
10 The Threads of Our Story: The Unsaid in Recent Israeli Prose
A Gate or an Abyss? Amos Oz, A Tale of Love and Darkness and Scenes from Village Life
“To Remind Us of What Used to Be Here. To Amend the Wrong”: Yitzchak Laor, Ecce Homo;
Daniella Carmi, To Free an Elephant; Eshkol Nevo, Homesick; and Alon Hilu, The House of Rajani
A Rickety Place of Hope: Michal Govrin, Snapshots
Part Three Futurity and Action
11 The Past after the “End of History”
Mendacious Time
The Road Ahead
Hannah Arendt: Narrative and Action
The Specter of a Limbo World
To Start at Ground Level
12 Arresting Time: W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz
Probing the Spectacle of History
What Lies Underneath
“Things One Would Never Have Anticipated”
13 To Do Something, to Begin
The Fatal Quality Called Utopia: Ian McEwan, Black Dogs Strong and Soft Opinions: J. M. Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year On the Intricacies of “Doing Good in This World”: Kazuo Ishiguro, When We Were Orphans A Tale of Inaction: Ian McEwan, Atonement
14 The Terror of the Unforeseen
What the Science of History Hides: Philip Roth, The Plot against America Acknowledging the Multivalence of Reality: Paul Auster, Man in the Dark, and Alexander Kluge, Door by Door with a Different Life
15 On This Road: The Improbable Future
The Dead Child, or the Looming End of Natality The End of Mankind: Paul Auster, Oracle Night Reclaiming the Victims of the Crushing Effect Of What Could Not Be Put Back: Cormac McCarthy, The Road Of the Possibility of Making Things Happen in the Future
Coda: Toward a Hermeneutic of Futurity
Notes
Index