Mordecai Zev Feierberg and the Reveries of Redemption

Abstract

A shared phenomenon in the prose fiction of Western literatures in the late nineteenth century is the exploration of individual consciousness dissociated from collective existence. Although individual consciousness had been at the center of the fictional enterprise from the beginning, forming a first condition for the rise of the novel as genre, in the novel of sentiment and in the realistic novel the inner life of individual characters was largely produced dialectically from within the medium of social relations and social ideas. The description of an interior space deserving of attention for its own sake, a space generated by rules of its own which evince no clear or necessary connection to the larger social system, constitutes one of the points at which literature can be said to have become “modernist.” Thereafter, one of the central thematic preoccupations of fiction remains the representation of consciousness itself: memory, reflection, and the manifold operations of the imagination, especially the act of writing.