Vered Weiss, Assistant Lecturer in the Department of Comparative Literature, has been awarded her doctorate for her thesis entitled ‘Oh Other Where Art Thou: Spatial Awareness in Hebrew and English Literature of the Nineteenth to Mid Twentieth Century’, under the supervision of Dr Axel Stähler.
Her thesis compares several canonical works of Hebrew and English literature of the nineteenth- to mid-twentieth century and reveals similarities in the employment of Gothic elements.
Both literatures utilise Gothic tropes, as the Gothic is a genre that uses spatial metaphors in order to offer social critique.
From the end of the 19th to the mid-20th century, the British were engaged with, and later relinquishing, the imperialist enterprise. At the same time, and in a parallel fashion though from the opposite direction, the Jews were commencing mass settlement and colonisation in Palestine-Israel.
Both communities found it necessary to re-examine the connection to the territories they were occupying and colonising.
The interplay between space, myth, and language is exposed as fundamental for the (re)construction of individual and collective identities in relation to sovereignty and spatial awareness. The narratives examined exhibit similar use of spatial and linguistic metaphors, as well as adaptations of mythologies, in order to reconsider these issues of identities in relation to sovereignty.
The comparative analysis in Vered’s thesis shows that the texts in Hebrew and English similarly use Gothic tropes in order to explore concerns of modernity. These tensions between modern identities, space, myths and sovereignty continue to be relevant in contemporary discussions.
Our congratulations to Dr Vered Weiss.
For more details of research programmes in Comparative Literature see:
www.kent.ac.uk/secl/complit/postgraduate/research-comparative-literature.html