This book illuminates literary thought from the perspective of superfluity and excess, honing in on what escapes the effort to subdue the text to ready-made categories such as the political or the aesthetic. It aims to give more substance to an “excess baggage”, fragile and explosive, which does not lend itself to full, exhaustive interpretation. Excess-oriented thinking operates through a pincer movement. From one side, it moves to map language’s surfeit assuming that nothing is outside text and that reality always comes to us mediated through language. But from the other, opposing side, this mode of thinking and reading “takes a glimpse&rdquo, at excess from the point of view of things: Here we look at the seepage of meaning out and beyond the linguistic container, at the domain in which represented reality, represented bodies and matter, reside. This pincer movement, whose axis emerges where words and things touch and don’t touch, seeks to dwell on the dividing line between words and things, making contact with the reality the text constitutes by scratching or cutting, and to identify, meanwhile, the main features of the emergent sensory-affective range. It is around this meridian of reading the superfluous that this book’s nine chapters, each dedicated to Hebrew literary writers, interlace. Each of these writers is situated at a key intersection in the historiography of modern Hebrew literature of the past century. These chapters offer readings of and research on the works of Yosef Haim Brenner, Uri Nissan Gnessin, Yoram Kaniuk, Meir Wieseltier, Haim Beer, Nurit Zarchi, Emile Habibi as translated by Anton Shammas, Hedva Harecavi, and Sami Berdugo.

Prof. Hanna Soker-Schwager, the author, is a scholar of Modern Hebrew Literature at the Department of Hebrew Literature, Ben Gurion University of the Negev. Her previous book was a study on Yaakov Shabtai’s writing in the context of Israeli culture, The Conjuror of the Tribe from the Workers&rsquo, Quarters, published at Hakibbutz Hameuchad. Her literary analyses take a contemporary literary theoretical perspective on Hebrew literature. She serves as editor of Mikan, a periodical dedicated to the study of Jewish and Israeli literature and culture.