“In Quest of <em>Du”</em>: Dialogue in Kafka and Agnon

Abstract

"In Quest of Du" is a literary comparative analysis of how dialogue in several Jewish literatures (in Hebrew, German and Aramaic) forms presence, concealment and attachments. By carefully reading the exchange between Abraham and Isaac in Genesis, the priest and Josef K. in The Trail, the rabbi and the tsaddiq in "The Hidden Tsaddiq" and several liturgical verses between the prayer and his addressee, God, the article suggests new theoretical insights for understanding performance in literature, and through that, the poetics and ideological deficiencies of Jewish literature. Alongside these dialogues, the article also explores literary and linguistics approaches to pronouns and their presence, German-Jewish philosophy of dialogism and its resonance in the work of Levinas and Derrida, delving again into literature's ability to forge links by way of dialogues, but also into dialogue's limits.