Between Exile and Return: S. Y. Agnon and the Drama of Writing

This innovative study of the modern Hebrew writer, S. Y. Agnon, offers new insight into his literary transformations of Jewish themes and sources. With particular attention to Kafka, Hoffman situates Agnon in the context of twentieth-century literature and examines such central issues in Agnon’s art as the relationship of the literary text to traditions of sacred writings, the place of the book in culture, and the relationship of writing to the body. Agnon’s writing moves between exile and return, enacting dramas of presence and absence, and attachment and loss. From the images of sacred texts found in some of his short fiction to the ideological conflicts that inform his larger novels, this book traces the geographical-cultural sweep of Agnon’s writing, as it moves through Eastern and Western Europe, positioning the Diaspora in relation to a Jerusalem that is both mundane and spiritual. Hoffman examines the ways in which Agnon’s writing produces an autobiographical myth that joins the figure of the writer to the life-history of the larger community of Israel. Moving from stories of writer and writing to the broader cultural canvas of several major novels, the author concludes with an analysis of the ways in which the fiction prompts interrogation of major cultural constructions concerning gender, the formative passage of the subject through the Oedipus complex, and the dissociation of culture from the body.