ביקורת דמות הגאון וערעור דימויה החילוני של הספרות העברית החדשה בכתיבתו של ר בנימין

תקציר

This article focuses on the ways in which the author and essayist Yehoshua Radler-Feldman, also known under his pseudonym R. Binyamin (1880-1957), perceived and defined the framework of Modern Hebrew literarure. Binyamin's engagement in various literary framework crystallized are examined as a basis for understanding the cultural horizons he claimed were negated by them. Binyamin, the article suggests, constructed the term "Hebrew Literature" as one that points to a collective existance, which includes literary works that are not necessarily part of belles-lettres and are not considered part of the secular-national literature - literary works that were actually removed from the hegemonic discourses of Modern Hebrew literature - in the same cultural and literary framework alongside canonical literary works. Binyamin's various personal attributes - being a Galician observant Jew and one of the major figures in the bi-national movements in the Yishuv such as Brit-Shalom, Kedma-Mizraha, the League for Jewish-Arab Rapprochement and Ihud, which harshly criticized the Jewish secular Zionist hegemony in Palestine - contributed to the construction of a different poetic approach and crystallization af a different understanding of the term "Modern Hebrew literature". This approach was characterized by its preference of understanding literature as a vessel of a shared existence of writing rather than as the exceptional achivements of individuals.