On the Historical Imaginary of Contemporary Israeli Fiction, or, Postmodernism's Aftermath in Novels by Lilach Netanel and Yiftach Ashkenazi

Abstract:In this article, I argue that Israeli literature of the last decade imagines Israeli history in a different way than its postmodern predecessors of the 1980s and 1990s. Focusing on the way history is imagined in Lilach Netanel's The Hebrew Condition and Yiftach Ashkenazi's Fulfillment, I argue that both novels consciously revolve around a crisis of historicity, or the ability to relate subjective experience to history. This article contends that literary celebration of the dissolution of the so-called Zionist metanarrative during the 1980s and 1990s is dialectically subsumed in the contemporary recognition of this dissolution as a generalized loss of the possibility of narrating history. I conclude by suggesting that this transformation in literary historical imaginary should be seen as part of an attempt to attempt to imagine solutions to the contradictions of Israeli neoliberal capitalism and its social effects.