Orly Castel-Bloom and Yoel Hoffmann: On Israeli Postmodern Prose Fiction

Postmodern Israeli prose fiction is a cluster of rather different novels and short stories, representing different poetics and ideological stances. Yet these different "postmodernisms" have something in common: the tendency to cling to some kind of narrative and meaning. The two writers discussed in this paper, Orly Castel-Bloom and Yoel Hoffmann, represent the "disintegrated" or "unraveled" prose fiction, characteristic of postmodernist writing. A few examples of these writers' fiction will illustrate that Israeli postmodernism, even when it deconstructs the collective narrative or the meta-narrative, doesn't actually give up the attempt, desperate as it may be, to cling onto the narrative and the promise of a meaning embodied in it.