Dancing, Standing Still: Back to the Hidden Source

Dancing, Standing Still (1993), is one of the more daring products of Israeli Postmodern fiction. It is a spoken monologue, a performance, uttered by a young woman whose life had been shattered. Her world contains three men, between whom she alternately moves – her husband, her beloved and her forme...

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Main Author: Avner Holtzman
Format: Article
Language:fra
Published: Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales 2015-01-01
Series:Yod
Subjects:
Online Access:http://journals.openedition.org/yod/2298
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author Avner Holtzman
author_facet Avner Holtzman
author_sort Avner Holtzman
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description Dancing, Standing Still (1993), is one of the more daring products of Israeli Postmodern fiction. It is a spoken monologue, a performance, uttered by a young woman whose life had been shattered. Her world contains three men, between whom she alternately moves – her husband, her beloved and her former lover. She has a daughter that was taken from her, and it is unclear whether she is looking for her of accepting her loss. She has parents who do not remember her name, and for her part, she is filled with feelings of estrangement towards them. There is an abundance of episodic characters, appearing in her life only to disappear again from whence they came. The book is composed of image upon image, segment upon segment, a nightmarish collage whose parts are not truly linked. Its diverse pieces are written in different codes: some of them more or less life-like, most of them surrealist and grotesque. Beyond the breathtaking grotesque carnival of nightmarish situations, are two noticeable underlying traumatic issues, One of them is the destruction of the private home as a consequense of the collapse of the heroine’s marriage. The other one is the desperate yearning to the daughter she had lost. A re-reading of Dancing, Standing Still reveals the fact, that at this almost forgotten inaugural novel’s dense core lies the root to many different phenomena that have developed and spread out in Shalev’s later books: characters, underlying themes, storylines, emotional materials, spoken sentences, grotesque patterns and figurative systems. One daresay the dense mental materials that had erupted lava-like from the author’s psyche, settling as concrete images on the pages of Dancing, Standing Still, constituted a primal reservoir, from which she has been drawing threads to this day.
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spelling doaj.art-be984eca0ad14b0eb725ea551c06fa4f2022-12-21T19:48:34ZfraInstitut National des Langues et Civilisations OrientalesYod0338-93162261-02002015-01-012010.4000/yod.2298Dancing, Standing Still: Back to the Hidden SourceAvner HoltzmanDancing, Standing Still (1993), is one of the more daring products of Israeli Postmodern fiction. It is a spoken monologue, a performance, uttered by a young woman whose life had been shattered. Her world contains three men, between whom she alternately moves – her husband, her beloved and her former lover. She has a daughter that was taken from her, and it is unclear whether she is looking for her of accepting her loss. She has parents who do not remember her name, and for her part, she is filled with feelings of estrangement towards them. There is an abundance of episodic characters, appearing in her life only to disappear again from whence they came. The book is composed of image upon image, segment upon segment, a nightmarish collage whose parts are not truly linked. Its diverse pieces are written in different codes: some of them more or less life-like, most of them surrealist and grotesque. Beyond the breathtaking grotesque carnival of nightmarish situations, are two noticeable underlying traumatic issues, One of them is the destruction of the private home as a consequense of the collapse of the heroine’s marriage. The other one is the desperate yearning to the daughter she had lost. A re-reading of Dancing, Standing Still reveals the fact, that at this almost forgotten inaugural novel’s dense core lies the root to many different phenomena that have developed and spread out in Shalev’s later books: characters, underlying themes, storylines, emotional materials, spoken sentences, grotesque patterns and figurative systems. One daresay the dense mental materials that had erupted lava-like from the author’s psyche, settling as concrete images on the pages of Dancing, Standing Still, constituted a primal reservoir, from which she has been drawing threads to this day.http://journals.openedition.org/yod/2298Shalev Zeruya (1959-)Israeli fictionPostmodernismSurrealismGrotesqueFantasy
spellingShingle Avner Holtzman
Dancing, Standing Still: Back to the Hidden Source
Yod
Shalev Zeruya (1959-)
Israeli fiction
Postmodernism
Surrealism
Grotesque
Fantasy
title Dancing, Standing Still: Back to the Hidden Source
title_full Dancing, Standing Still: Back to the Hidden Source
title_fullStr Dancing, Standing Still: Back to the Hidden Source
title_full_unstemmed Dancing, Standing Still: Back to the Hidden Source
title_short Dancing, Standing Still: Back to the Hidden Source
title_sort dancing standing still back to the hidden source
topic Shalev Zeruya (1959-)
Israeli fiction
Postmodernism
Surrealism
Grotesque
Fantasy
url http://journals.openedition.org/yod/2298
work_keys_str_mv AT avnerholtzman dancingstandingstillbacktothehiddensource