The Blossom Which We Are

Nir Evron

Description

The Blossom Which We Are traces the emergence of a distinctly modern form of human vulnerability—our intimate dependence on the fragile and time-bound cultural frameworks that we inhabit—as it manifests in the realm of the novel. Nir Evron juxtaposes seminal works from diverse national literatures to demonstrate that the trope of cultural extinction offers key insights into the emotional and ideological work performed by the realist novel. With an analysis that ranges from the works of Maria Edgeworth and Walter Scott, Edith Wharton's Age of Innocence and Joseph Roth's Radetzky March and Yaakov Shabtai's Past Continuous, and finally to the current state of the humanities, this book seeks to recover literary criticism's humanistic mission, bringing the best that has been thought and said to bear on urgent contemporary concerns.
Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Culturalism, Vulnerability, and Transience

2. An Ironist's Elegy: Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence

3. "Und siehe da: Es gab also fremde Länder!": Joseph Roth's Parochializing of Empire

4. The Culturalization of Zionism: Yaakov Shabtai's Past Continuous

5. Culturalism and Historicism in Contemporary Intellectual Life

Works Cited
Index

Sujets

• Europe
• États-Unis
• Middle East
• Literary theory
• Comparative literature
• United States of America
• USA

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 01 novembre 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438480695
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Blossom Which We Are
SERIES EDITORS
David E. Johnson, Comparative Literature, University at Buffalo
Scott Michaelsen, English, Michigan State University
SERIES ADVISORY BOARD
Nahum D. Chandler, African American Studies, University of California, Irvine
Rebecca Comay, Philosophy and Comparative Literature, University of Toronto
Marc Crépon, Philosophy, École Normale Supérieure, Paris
Jonathan Culler, Comparative Literature, Cornell University
Johanna Drucker, Design Media Arts and Information Studies, University of California, Los Angeles
Christopher Fynsk, Modern Thought, Aberdeen University
Rodolphe Gasché, Comparative Literature, University at Buffalo
Martin Hägglund, Comparative Literature, Yale University
Carol Jacobs, German and Comparative Literature, Yale University
Peggy Kamuf, French and Comparative Literature, University of Southern California
David Marriott, History of Consciousness, University of California, Santa Cruz
Steven Miller, English, University at Buffalo
Alberto Moreiras, Hispanic Studies, Texas A M University
Patrick O’Donnell, English, Michigan State University
Pablo Oyarzún, Teoría del Arte, Universidad de Chile
Scott Cutler Shershow, English, University of California, Davis
Henry Sussman, German and Comparative Literature, Yale University
Samuel Weber, Comparative Literature, Northwestern University
Ewa Ziarek, Comparative Literature, University at Buffalo
The Blossom Which We Are
The Novel and the Transience of Cultural Worlds
Nir Evron
Cover image: Hummingbird and Apple Blossoms , by Martin Johnson Heade, 1875.
Courtesy of the Met.
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2020 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Evron, Nir, 1976– author.
Title: The blossom which we are : the novel and the transience of cultural worlds / Nir Evron.
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, 2020. | Series: SUNY series, literature … in theory | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019058377 | ISBN 9781438480671 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438480695 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Fiction—20th century—History and criticism. | Fiction—Social aspects. | Literature and society—History—20th century. | Social change in literature. | Culture in literature.
Classification: LCC PN3344 .E97 2020 | DDC 809.3/9358—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019058377
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Contents
A CKNOWLEDGMENTS
I NTRODUCTION
C HAPTER 1
Culturalism, Vulnerability, and Transience
C HAPTER 2
An Ironist’s Elegy: Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence
C HAPTER 3
“Und siehe da: Es gab also fremde Länder!”: Joseph Roth’s Parochializing of Empire
C HAPTER 4
The Culturalization of Zionism: Yaakov Shabtai’s Past Continuous
C HAPTER 5
Culturalism and Historicism in Contemporary Intellectual Life
W ORKS C ITED
I NDEX
Acknowledgments
This book has had a long gestation period, during which I have accrued many debts to mentors, friends, and colleagues. I would like to thank Amir Eshel, Russell Berman, and Sepp Gumbrecht for their belief in this project when it was still in its infancy, as well as to Marton Dornbach for introducing me to Joseph Roth. I was fortunate to find an academic home in the most nurturing of departments. My thanks go out to my colleagues Noam Reisner, Shirley Sharon-Zisser, Yael Sternhell, Roi Tartakovsky, Dara Barnat, Jonathan Stavsky, Elana Gomel, and Sonia Weiner for their friendship and support, as well as to Ilana Etgar and Sigalit Shual for their professionalism and kindness. Anat Karolin has read every word of the manuscript and saved me from countless errors and embarrassments. Harris Feinsod, Yael Shapira, Leona Toker, and Irene Tucker have each provided valuable comments at crucial junctures. I owe particular debts of gratitude to Hana Wirth-Nesher, for her unflagging encouragement and advocacy, and, finally, to Milette Shamir who has been everything one could hope for in a colleague, and so much more.
My daughters, Talila and Nina, have been a constant source of pride and happiness, especially during the last few intensive years. What I owe to my wife, Galia Evron, can hardly be expressed here. I dedicate this book to her.

Early versions of parts of chapters 2 and 4 have been published under the following titles:
“Realism, Irony and Morality in Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence ,” Journal of Modern Literature 35, no. 2 (2012): 37–51.
“Against Philosophy: Yaakov Shabtai’s Past Continuous as Therapeutic Literature,” Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas 14, no. 1 (2016): 35–55.
Introduction
“ T he greatest creations in world literature,” remarked the late Amos Oz, “have generally been produced in the twilight, or in relation to a period of twilight.” 1 Twilight stands here for the unraveling of a cultural world, as its customs, beliefs, and linguistic patterns are overtaken by new regimes of meaning and power. “Periods of flourishing success … when things are getting bigger and stronger are not propitious to storytellers,” states Oz. It is when a civilization begins to fall apart, when established institutions and ideologies lose their purchase on the minds of their inheritors, that the literary imagination comes into its own:
And so, in the twilight between a great sunset and the vague glimmering of a new dawn, someone like Dante stands poised between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Or Cervantes and Shakespeare on the threshold of the modern age. Or the great Russian literature of Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, written to the accompaniment of the death-knell of Orthodox, tsarist Russia. … Similarly Thomas Mann, and in a different way Kafka too, [writing] in the period of the decline of comfortable bourgeois Europe, heavy with years and old ways and manners and patterns of behavior and speech and mentalities, and in their differing ways knowing that this world was doomed. 2
This rough-and-ready sketch is open to criticism on several fronts. 3 But Oz is surely right that “twilight”—the ending of a Golden Age or passing of an era—has been one of Western literature’s earliest and most enduring preoccupations. How early? Another well-known survey—this one by Raymond Williams—wryly traces the trope from twentieth-century invocations (by F.R. Leavis and others) back to nineteenth-century elegies to the pre-industrial English countryside (in Thomas Hardy and George Eliot), eighteenth-century paeans to pre-enclosure rural virtues (Oliver Goldsmith), early Elizabethan responses to commercialism (Philip Massinger), Thomas More’s Utopia , the Magna Carte, Virgil, and eventually all the way back to the Garden of Eden, the terminus post quem of the Western canon. 4
The present study will not stretch quite that far, nor will it cover the range of literary modes evoked by Oz’s and Williams’s sweeping genealogies. For reasons that will soon become evident, it will restrict itself to a single type, which I call the novel of cultural extinction, and offer close readings in the works of three of its most accomplished twentieth-century practitioners: American Edith Wharton, Austro-Hungarian Joseph Roth, and Israeli Yaakov Shabtai. Contextualizing the book’s argument, however, will require reaching back beyond the Great War to the beginning of the long nineteenth century, when the form acquires its trademark historicist view of culture and culturalist view of the self. For it is then, in the seminal works of Maria Edgeworth and Walter Scott, that the theme of cultural extinction, by which I mean the terminal disappearance of distinct, geographically locatable, and culturally identifiable ways of life, begins to assume its recognizable modern shape.
As this book will show, underlying the striking similarities in concern and method among Wharton, Roth, and Shabtai is a durable, fertile, and highly appropriable repository of tropes and representational strategies, which, after being first assembled and reworked into narrative prose fiction by Edgeworth, Scott, and their peers, radiated out of England’s Anglo-Celtic periphery to become, by the middle of the twentieth century, a truly global genre. Indeed, the preoccupation with cultural vanishing not only links the exemplary figures at the center of this study; it is the thread that ties James Fenimore Cooper to Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Ippolito Nievo to Thomas Hardy, Theodor Fontane to Willa Cather, S.Y. Agnon to Chinua Achebe, Ahmed Ali to Evelyn Waugh, and Tomasi di Lampedusa to Mario Vargas Llosa—a provisional list that would expand significantly were we to include the scores of mid- and late-nineteenth-century regionalist writers in Europe and America who sought to record in fi