Futurity: Contemporary Literature and the Quest for the Past
by Amir Eshel
University of Chicago Press, 2012 Cloth: 978-0-226-92495-3 | eISBN: 978-0-226-92496-0 Library of Congress Classification PN50.E84 2013 Dewey Decimal Classification 809.93358
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
ABOUT THIS BOOK
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.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Amil Eshel is Edward Clark Crossett Professor of Humanistic Studies and director of the Europe Center at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University.
REVIEWS
“Amir Eshel writes from the perspective of a new ethics of literary and historical narration, whose focus is a new, post-utopian humanitarianism based in remembrance of the past.”
— Der Tagespiegel, on the German edition
“Using an appealing combination of novels by German and Israeli writers, Amir Eshel produces a powerful and refreshing argument that these texts, which look back at past events, nonetheless point forward to future solutions to the problems they address. Convincing and engaging, Futurity will open the eyes of many readers to an important but often neglected function of literature.”
— Judith Ryan, Harvard University
“Amir Eshel’s Futurity is a remarkable book about contemporary German, Hebrew, and Anglo-American literature and its obsession with the catastrophic world of the twentieth century. Animated by the passionate belief that literature has the power to change us, Eshel shifts the focus away from our own obsession with this catastrophe, uncovering the dimension of the future that these texts harbor at their core. A committed and lucid reader of the literary, Eshel recovers the complexities of literary texts by reviving the humanism of Arendt’s post-catastrophic philosophy. Deeply political, Futurity makes the strongest possible case for poetic language as a practice that asserts human agency.”
— Robert Alter, University of California, Berkeley
“Amir Eshel’s Futurity is a remarkable book about contemporary German, Hebrew, and Anglo-American literature and its obsession with the catastrophic world of the twentieth century. Animated by the passionate belief that literature has the power to change us, Eshel shifts the focus away from our own obsession with this catastrophe, uncovering the dimension of the future that these texts harbor at their core. A committed and lucid reader of the literary, Eshel recovers the complexities of literary texts by reviving the humanism of Arendt’s post-catastrophic philosophy. Deeply political, Futurity makes the strongest possible case for poetic language as a practice that asserts human agency.”
— Julia Hell, University of Michigan
“It is a tour de force, in which German, Hebrew, and Anglo-American contemporary literature—more precisely, literature of catastrophes—is compared and linked. But what do Gütner Grass, Martin Walser, and Bernhard Schlink have in common with Abraham B. Yehoshua, Amos Oz and David Grossman, and the latter with Ian McEwan, Philip Roth, and Paul Auster? . . . [Eshel] draws a bold arch from The Tin Drum to Oz’s A Tale of Love and Darkness, to Auster’s Man in the Dark and Roth’s The Plot Against America—from the Holocause to the flight and expulsion of the Palestinians, to American catastrophes that remain fictions in the worsk of Auster and Roth. . . . Eshel believes that such works different cultures ‘expand the reservoir of words, images, and ideas’ which we use to create ourselves anew.”
— Die Zeit
“At a time when the pace of change seems to have the velocity of a bullet, it is refreshing to read an affirmation of literature’s sustained power to transform on a more profound, enduring level. Futurity lauds the sustainable beauty and power of real literature to outstrip the instantaneous and insubstantial veneer of wireless social networks. . . . A provocative and stimulating read.”
— Choice
“Compelling. . . . Throughout, Eshel urges us to consider how we read, to what end we analyze literature, and what drives our practice of literary criticism.”
— Hebrew Studies
“The book is an impressive achievement. Eshel covers an enormous range of authors in three languages and offers subtle and nuanced readings of all of them. Moreover, his ability to discern narrative patterns across generations and literatures as well as particular repeated motifs that speak to ‘futurity’ . . . is remarkable.”
— Carolyn J. Dean, History and Theory
“Eshel’s study constitutes an important contribution to the interdisciplinary field of futurity studies. . . . His book delivers a powerful justification of the role literature can play in serving as mediator and arbiter of the retrospective and prospective viewpoints on modern human social life and of its challenges moving forward into the twenty-first century.”
— German Quarterly
“Futurity is a generous and innovative work, with a remarkable breadth of cultural reference. More than most books on post-1945 literature and culture, it is a true work of comparativist criticism, moving effortlessly between three languages and several national literary traditions, impressively identifying connections between texts that most readers would not notice.”
— Partial Answers
“A perceptive, wide-ranging, and thorough investigation. . . . By way of accessible prose, meticulous and consistent methodology, insightful readings, and sophisticated analyses, Eshel not only adds significantly to the scholarship on each period, author, and novel, but makes this volume a must-read for scholars and students of contemporary literature.”
— Studies in the Novel
“Eshel advocates for a political reading of contemporary literature. This opens our eyes to connections and, with them, possibilities for action previously unseen.”
— Arcadia
“Engages with world literature and reads magisterially across a wide range of Western literary traditions. . . . Eshel’s argument is crucially important for our understanding of recent US literary production.”
— American Literary History
“[Eshel] coins the concept of ‘futurity’ to describe the way that literature helps us face past historical traumas while also prompting us to remain optimistic about shaping the future. . . . It’s a nice idea, that the most depressing fiction is also potentially the most catalytic. In this way, authors are trying to say: I get it, things are awful, but if my characters can do it, so can you.”
— Boston Globe
“[Eshel’s] vast, lavish, tightly argued and exceptionally interesting book—in which every sentence, every word, is important—may be for many years to come the resource par excellence for provoking philosophical reaction (and reflection, as Eshel himself would hope for) on a concept of the future as a potentially fruitful and genuine development of the traumatic past.”
— Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
“Fascinating. . . . A rich and stimulating meditation on contemporary literature of all stripes. . . . Reminds us that futurity remains intimately connected to arts of memory, debates about history, and our undiminished need for new forms of commemoration.”
— German Studies Review
TABLE OF CONTENTS
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
REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
If you are a student who cannot use this book in printed form, BiblioVault may be able to supply you
with an electronic file for alternative access.
Please have the accessibility coordinator at your school fill out this form.
Futurity: Contemporary Literature and the Quest for the Past
by Amir Eshel
University of Chicago Press, 2012 Cloth: 978-0-226-92495-3 eISBN: 978-0-226-92496-0
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.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Amil Eshel is Edward Clark Crossett Professor of Humanistic Studies and director of the Europe Center at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University.
REVIEWS
“Amir Eshel writes from the perspective of a new ethics of literary and historical narration, whose focus is a new, post-utopian humanitarianism based in remembrance of the past.”
— Der Tagespiegel, on the German edition
“Using an appealing combination of novels by German and Israeli writers, Amir Eshel produces a powerful and refreshing argument that these texts, which look back at past events, nonetheless point forward to future solutions to the problems they address. Convincing and engaging, Futurity will open the eyes of many readers to an important but often neglected function of literature.”
— Judith Ryan, Harvard University
“Amir Eshel’s Futurity is a remarkable book about contemporary German, Hebrew, and Anglo-American literature and its obsession with the catastrophic world of the twentieth century. Animated by the passionate belief that literature has the power to change us, Eshel shifts the focus away from our own obsession with this catastrophe, uncovering the dimension of the future that these texts harbor at their core. A committed and lucid reader of the literary, Eshel recovers the complexities of literary texts by reviving the humanism of Arendt’s post-catastrophic philosophy. Deeply political, Futurity makes the strongest possible case for poetic language as a practice that asserts human agency.”
— Robert Alter, University of California, Berkeley
“Amir Eshel’s Futurity is a remarkable book about contemporary German, Hebrew, and Anglo-American literature and its obsession with the catastrophic world of the twentieth century. Animated by the passionate belief that literature has the power to change us, Eshel shifts the focus away from our own obsession with this catastrophe, uncovering the dimension of the future that these texts harbor at their core. A committed and lucid reader of the literary, Eshel recovers the complexities of literary texts by reviving the humanism of Arendt’s post-catastrophic philosophy. Deeply political, Futurity makes the strongest possible case for poetic language as a practice that asserts human agency.”
— Julia Hell, University of Michigan
“It is a tour de force, in which German, Hebrew, and Anglo-American contemporary literature—more precisely, literature of catastrophes—is compared and linked. But what do Gütner Grass, Martin Walser, and Bernhard Schlink have in common with Abraham B. Yehoshua, Amos Oz and David Grossman, and the latter with Ian McEwan, Philip Roth, and Paul Auster? . . . [Eshel] draws a bold arch from The Tin Drum to Oz’s A Tale of Love and Darkness, to Auster’s Man in the Dark and Roth’s The Plot Against America—from the Holocause to the flight and expulsion of the Palestinians, to American catastrophes that remain fictions in the worsk of Auster and Roth. . . . Eshel believes that such works different cultures ‘expand the reservoir of words, images, and ideas’ which we use to create ourselves anew.”
— Die Zeit
“At a time when the pace of change seems to have the velocity of a bullet, it is refreshing to read an affirmation of literature’s sustained power to transform on a more profound, enduring level. Futurity lauds the sustainable beauty and power of real literature to outstrip the instantaneous and insubstantial veneer of wireless social networks. . . . A provocative and stimulating read.”
— Choice
“Compelling. . . . Throughout, Eshel urges us to consider how we read, to what end we analyze literature, and what drives our practice of literary criticism.”
— Hebrew Studies
“The book is an impressive achievement. Eshel covers an enormous range of authors in three languages and offers subtle and nuanced readings of all of them. Moreover, his ability to discern narrative patterns across generations and literatures as well as particular repeated motifs that speak to ‘futurity’ . . . is remarkable.”
— Carolyn J. Dean, History and Theory
“Eshel’s study constitutes an important contribution to the interdisciplinary field of futurity studies. . . . His book delivers a powerful justification of the role literature can play in serving as mediator and arbiter of the retrospective and prospective viewpoints on modern human social life and of its challenges moving forward into the twenty-first century.”
— German Quarterly
“Futurity is a generous and innovative work, with a remarkable breadth of cultural reference. More than most books on post-1945 literature and culture, it is a true work of comparativist criticism, moving effortlessly between three languages and several national literary traditions, impressively identifying connections between texts that most readers would not notice.”
— Partial Answers
“A perceptive, wide-ranging, and thorough investigation. . . . By way of accessible prose, meticulous and consistent methodology, insightful readings, and sophisticated analyses, Eshel not only adds significantly to the scholarship on each period, author, and novel, but makes this volume a must-read for scholars and students of contemporary literature.”
— Studies in the Novel
“Eshel advocates for a political reading of contemporary literature. This opens our eyes to connections and, with them, possibilities for action previously unseen.”
— Arcadia
“Engages with world literature and reads magisterially across a wide range of Western literary traditions. . . . Eshel’s argument is crucially important for our understanding of recent US literary production.”
— American Literary History
“[Eshel] coins the concept of ‘futurity’ to describe the way that literature helps us face past historical traumas while also prompting us to remain optimistic about shaping the future. . . . It’s a nice idea, that the most depressing fiction is also potentially the most catalytic. In this way, authors are trying to say: I get it, things are awful, but if my characters can do it, so can you.”
— Boston Globe
“[Eshel’s] vast, lavish, tightly argued and exceptionally interesting book—in which every sentence, every word, is important—may be for many years to come the resource par excellence for provoking philosophical reaction (and reflection, as Eshel himself would hope for) on a concept of the future as a potentially fruitful and genuine development of the traumatic past.”
— Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
“Fascinating. . . . A rich and stimulating meditation on contemporary literature of all stripes. . . . Reminds us that futurity remains intimately connected to arts of memory, debates about history, and our undiminished need for new forms of commemoration.”
— German Studies Review
TABLE OF CONTENTS
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
REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
If you are a student who cannot use this book in printed form, BiblioVault may be able to supply you
with an electronic file for alternative access.
Please have the accessibility coordinator at your school fill out this form.
It can take 2-3 weeks for requests to be filled.
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
