Pragmatic-Psychoanalytic Interpretations of Amos Oz's Writings: Words Significantly Uttered presents intermediate links between three intellectual domains: the literary works of Amos Oz, American Pragmatism, and object-relations psychoanalysis. The interdisciplinary method employed here involves a presentation of Oz's writings as the starting point for an existential debate that addresses a mental-conceptual struggle. This conceptual conflict, which has been given aesthetic shape in the literary work, inspires the presentation of central pragmatic and psychoanalytic concepts with which one may evaluate how each of these domains might contribute to a new and richer understanding of the conceptual tension or existential challenge. Each of the chapters aimed to interpret Oz's works not only as literary masterpieces but as existential-philosophical expressions. Dorit Lemberger's main argument is that Oz reconceptualized psychological, personal, familial, and often national, processes in a way that allows readers to understand such processes in general life from a retrospective perspective.
Dorit Lemberger is lecturer of hermeneutics and cultural studies at Bar-Ilan University.
Chapter One: "Love is a curious mixture of opposites": The Symbolic Function of Language in Psychoanalysis and its Use in The Same Sea and A Tale of Love and Darkness Chapter Two: Pierce's Categories of Consciousness in Where the Jackals Howl and My Michael - A Pragmatic and Psychoanalytic Interpretation Chapter Three: Between Guilt and Betrayal and the Possibility of Self-Control: Oz's Unto Death, Panther in the Basement and Judas from an Interdisciplinary Point of View Chapter Four: The Journey to the True Self in Elsewhere, Perhaps and A Perfect Peace: A Multi-Dimensional Perspective Chapter Five: Living Meaningfully - Self-Creativity in Black Box
Pragmatic-Psychoanalytic Interpretations of Amos Oz's Writings: Words Significantly Uttered sheds new light on the literary oeuvre of Amos Oz, one of the greatest authors of the second half of the twentieth century. Dr. Dorit Lemberger's achievement in completing the complex task she took upon herself is impressive, and she succeeded by creating an original, effective research approach based on an extensive network of connections between several fields of knowledge: literature, language and linguistics, psychology, and pragmatist philosophy. -- Yigal Schwartz, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev Dorit Lemberger offers us a thought-provoking philosophical grammar of literature. It's with new eyes that she reads Amos Oz's work, and it's with enriched language that we finish reading her masterful study, eyes and language that linger on while we turn to the works of others. -- Shimon Adaf, Ben Gurion University of the Negev
