Makers of Worlds, Readers of Signs : Israeli and Palestinian Literature of the Global Contemporary

A sweeping new theory of world literature through a study of Palestinian and Israeli literature from the 1940s to the present Makers of Worlds, Readers of Signs charts the aesthetic and political formation of neoliberalism and globalization in Israeli and Palestinian literature from the 1940s to the present. By tracking literature’s move from making worlds to reading signs, Cohen Lustig proposes a new way to read theorize our global contemporary. Cohen Lustig argues that the period of Israeli statism and its counterpart of Palestinian statelessness produced works that sought to make and create whole worlds and social time—create the new state of Israel, preserve collective visions of Palestinian statehood. During the period of neoliberalism, the period after 1985 in Israel and the 1993 Oslo Accords in Palestine, literature became about the reading of signs, where politics and history are now rearticulated through the private lives of individual subjects. Here characters do not make social time but live within it and inquire after its missing origin. Cohen Lustig argues for new ways to track the subjectivities and aesthetics produced by larger shifts in production. In so doing, he proposes a new model to understand the historical development of Israeli and Palestinian literature as well as world literature in our contemporary moment. With a preface from Fredric Jameson. "Makers of Worlds, Readers of Signs presents a new theoretical and historical approach to Israeli and Palestinian literature, as well as to the contemporary system of world literature, one that accounts for the consequences of neoliberal globalization. Cohen Lustig proposes that until the neoliberal moment, socio-poetic form was defined by concepts of autonomy and temporality: in Western Europe autonomy is defined as a ready-made property of the individual subject; in Israel and Palestine, between the 1940s and the 1990s, autonomy was the ground for debate over collective political and aesthetic projects. In the global neoliberal period, after 1985 in Israel and the 1993 Oslo Accords in Palestine, when privatization escalated in the region, social life and literature begin to revolve around the experience of subjects for whom the world was no longer an object to be made but a text to be read. In this historical condition, Israeli and Palestinian literature narrated the political conditions of local life in a way that exceeded the nation state and questioned the coherence of private life. To see this transformation requires a new concept of global literature that can track the development of subjectivity and aesthetics through larger shifts in politics and economic production"-- Provided by publisher