Shattered Vessels

Michal Peled Ginsburg is Professor of French and Comparative Literature and Chair of the Department of French and Italian at Northwestern University. She is the author of Flaubert Writing: A Study in Narrative Strategies; Economies of Change: Form and Transformation in the Nineteenth-Century Novel; and editor of Approaches to Teaching Balzac's Old Goriot. Moshe Ron is Senior Lecturer in English and Comparative Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is the translator of La Pharmacie de Platon by Jacques Derrida, as well as works by Raymond Carver and Paul Auster.

• Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Flirting with the Uncanny Narrative OrganizationChronologyIdentitiesUncanny Photo 2. The Eyes of a Woman in (and out of) Love: Creation, Painting, and Betrayal in Shahar's Fiction "Of Shadows and the Image""Of Dreams""First Lesson"His Majesty's AgentOf Candles and Winds 3. Shahar's Jerusalem Small World/Liminal SpaceSpace and PlotHeterotopiaAn Urban Idyll 4. Otherness, Identity, and Place Fluid Identities and Violent MobsThe Portrait of the Narrator as an Arab ChauffeurExchanging Clothes, Exchanging PlacesCanaanite, Hebrew, JewA Cautionary Tale 5. Remembering Proust Similes of MemoryMetaphor and MetonymyAutobiographical NarrationApprenticeshipArtists Notes Bibliography Index

"Ginsburg's and Ron's book is thorough, systematic, and insightful, and it puts Shahar in the context of his Israeli colleagues and the larger arc of European and English fiction. The concluding chapter, which elaborates a brilliant and illuminating comparison of Proust and Shahar, is alone worth the price of admission. I have read Shahar for years with great interest, both in the original Hebrew and in English translation, and learned a great deal from this deft book. It breaks significant new ground both in comparative literature and Israeli fiction." — Murray Baumgarten, author of City Scriptures"One of the admirable characteristics of David Shahar's narratives is their capacity to both dexterously and elegantly interweave aesthetic/artistic merits with a cogently persuasive ideological creed. This book does justice to those two interlaced routes in Shahar's work while discerning and tracing them prudently and insightfully." — Yair Mazor, author of Somber Lust: The Art of Amos Oz