From World to Globe: The Transformation of Israeli Cultural Production in the Time of Neoliberal Globalization

Abstract

Abstract This essay examines recent developments in Israeli cultural production. To do so, it argues, we must think of new cultural forms as responses to the neoliberal privatization reforms that accompany globalization. These reforms have altered Israeli social life to the degree that the once peripheral literature and cinema that conformed to Fredric Jameson's definition of Third World national allegories can now be read as symptoms of First World cultural production. This historical and aesthetic shift has made itself felt at the heart of Israeli daily life in the rearticulation of the relation between private and public spheres. Recent Israeli literature and film consequently invite us to rethink the stylistic preoccupation of contemporary theories of world literature by asking how these media use aesthetic figures to give form to the concepts of freedom, necessity, and knowledge. To look at this aesthetic and political shift, I offer a comparative reading of Yeshayahu Koren's 1967 novella, Funeral at Noon, and Adam Sanderson's 2014 cinematic adaptation of that novella.