The Elsewhere

On Belonging at a Near Distance

Adam Zachary Newton

• Éditeur: University of Wisconsin Press
• Année: 2005
• ISBN:
  9780299208936
• Sujet: Literatura
• Sous-sujet: Crítica literaria

"The Elsewhere." Or, midbar-biblical Hebrew for both "wilderness" and "speech." A place of possession and dispossession, loss and nostalgia. But also a place that speaks. Ingeniously using a Talmudic interpretive formula about the disposition of boundaries, Newton explores narratives of "place, flight, border, and beyond." The writers of The Elsewhere are a disparate company of twentieth-century memoirists and fabulists from the Levant (Palestine/Israel, Egypt) and East Central Europe. Together, their texts-cunningly paired so as to speak to one another in mutually revelatory ways-narrate the paradox of the "near distance."