Roni Masel (UC Berkeley) - “Apostrophe, Animation, and the Mute Nation: The Politics of Lyric Failure in Fin-de-Siècle Hebrew Verse”

“Apostrophe, Animation, and the Mute Nation: The Politics of Lyric Failure in Fin-de-Siècle Hebrew Verse”

This talk looks at a corpus of popular Hebrew verse of the late nineteenth century known as the poetry of “Hibbat Tsiyon,” or the poetry of the proto-Zionist movement “Love of Zion.” Both contemporary readers and later critics acknowledged its great popularity but lamented what they viewed as its poetic failures – most often mentioning its hyperbolic, sentimentalist, and melodramatic mood and its heavy reliance on biblical allusions or pastiche. In this talk I follow Barbara Johnson’s analysis of the apostrophe and the form of the lyric to examine the analytical prospects of this corpus’s so-called poetic failure, asking what a queer theory view of failure as politically generative can offer us in understanding a key moment in the emergence of Jewish nationalism in the late nineteenth century. I will argue that two central poetic features of this corpus—failed apostrophe and failed allegory—require of us to rethink Hebrew poetry beyond the all-encompassing narratives that have repeatedly informed our understanding of the emergence of modern Hebrew literature. Reading fin-de-siècle Hebrew verse beyond the narratives of nationalism and nationalization, the language revival, and the modernization of the Jews through a romantic subjectivity, the “Love of Zion” poetry promoted, I demonstrate, an overlooked poetic-political modality: It developed a mode of anti-Romantic Hebrew decadence to articulate a non-nationalist Jewish particularism.

Roni Masel is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at UC Berkeley, working on Hebrew and Yiddish literatures in the context of modern Jewish history in Eastern Europe, the history of reading and history of the book, and queer and postcolonial theory. Masel is currently completing a book manuscript titled Bad Readers: Misreading, Mistranslation, and Other Textual Malpractices in Hebrew and Yiddish, from which this talk draws. A new project, “Yiddish Empires: Visions of Race and the Global in Modern Yiddish Culture,” analyzes a globalizing Yiddish culture in the twentieth century between Europe, North America, and South Africa.