Let us have individuals who despair": the experience of alienation in culture and literature

Hebrew writers who began writing at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century introduced a new type of hero called "Hatalush", to highlight his being unconnected, uprooted from his place, without roots, someone who has lost the ground under his feet. The archetype of the "Hatalush" in the work of Brenner, Gnesin, Chava Shapira etc. is, usually, that of a Yeshiva young man left his parents home in Eastern Europe, and went to big cities in Europe, the USA or the Land of Israel, he was unable to take root and thus remained torn between worlds.

A central question in the seminar is the connection between the idea of alienation and the political reality today, outside the historical context of the "Hatalush", at the heart of violent Israeli sovereignty.

In Hebrew and Israeli culture and history, the possibilities of alienation are almost endless: old world versus new world; religion versus secularism; Between Mizrahi and Ashkenazi, between languages and so on. In the seminar we will examine through reading literary and theoretical texts, and through works of art this binary language and it's meaning even today in our complex culture.