Keren Omry | University of Haifa (original) (raw)
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Papers by Keren Omry
Routledge eBooks, Jan 24, 2023
Science Fiction Studies, 2017
African American Review, 2016
Ishmael Reed's novel Mumbo Jumbo (1972) and Toni Morrison's Paradise (1998) stand as two ... more Ishmael Reed's novel Mumbo Jumbo (1972) and Toni Morrison's Paradise (1998) stand as two crucial signposts identifying the trajectory of an African American aesthetic. Central to the aesthetics of each is a subversion of the very process of historical or generic categorization that reduces the complexity of human experience to a simplified, linear catalogue of events or trends. The authors introduce a musical sensibility into their respective writings, expanding the literary palette, the effects of which emphasize the impotence of an exclusive, deterministic, and category-bound history and disrupting a linear strategy of historical narrative. Significantly, this musical sensibility is a jazz-based one and produces a jazz aesthetic that saturates Reed's and Morrison's works. Linking black fiction with blues and/or jazz music has, by now, an extensive scholarly history. (1) Although often widely varied in approach, this large body of scholarship has established a recog...
Introduction Donna Haraway‟s seminal article drafting the cyborg as a key metaphor for the anti-o... more Introduction Donna Haraway‟s seminal article drafting the cyborg as a key metaphor for the anti-original, inherently plural, and endlessly dynamic paradigm explaining the western culture of the late twentieth century still proves a potent image that resonates in more recent decades. Haraway‟s striking metaphor becomes literally manifest and productively fictionalized in the science fictional writing of Octavia Butler. Using Haraway‟s model as the theoretical basis for analysis, this article will offer a critical reading of Butler‟s work, exploring the intersection of racial, gendered, and generic considerations. To ground this theoretical context in the discourse of race and feminism which inevitably functions in a critical reading of Butler‟s work, I hope to productively complicate the cyborg metaphor through ideas articulated by bell hooks and Paul Gilroy. Hooks‟s writing offers a singular perspective on black feminism, which focuses on performativity as a perpetual process subver...
Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas
Science Fiction Film & Television
Journal of American Studies, 2005
The Department of English Language & Literature at the University of Haifa is pleased to announce... more The Department of English Language & Literature at the University of Haifa is pleased to announce a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship to join Slipping Sideways: Contemporaneity and Alternate Histories, an ongoing project funded by the Israeli Science Foundation, and conducted by Dr. Keren Omry.
Deadline: March 1, 2021
Duration: 1 year (possible option to extend to a second year)
James Baldwin and Toni Morrison: Comparative Critical and Theoretical Essays, 2006
Toni Morrison's A Mercy: Critical Approaches, 2011
CR: The New Centennial Review, 2019
In this article, I adopt two key terms, posthumanism and interbeings, to consider representations... more In this article, I adopt two key terms, posthumanism and interbeings, to consider representations of the politics, ethics, and aesthetics of the contemporary. Focusing on Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being (2013) and The Face: A Time Code (2015), I examine how literature, particularly speculative literature, challenges the stability of such categories as individual, character, fiction, Realism, and Humanism. The article examines the relationship of autobiography to time, time to authorship, and reader to text, showing how Ozeki seeks moral accounting for technology, recognising the embodied but changing, multiple human agent who has the capacity to retain ethical boundaries in a changing world.
Science Fiction Studies, 2016
Acting and Performance in Moving Image Culture: Bodies, Screens, Renderings. With a Foreword by Lesley Stern, 2012
James Baldwin and Toni Morrison, 2006
... BALDWINS BOP n'MORRISONS MOOD 19 struggles with the conflict of her ideological racism, the n... more ... BALDWINS BOP n'MORRISONS MOOD 19 struggles with the conflict of her ideological racism, the necessity of succumbing to racial stereotypes (in ... of their relationship, though the very attempt to overcome their differences and the true love they share indicate the hope of the ...
Studies in the Novel, 2015
ESHEL, AMIR. Futurity: Contemporary Literature and the Quest for the Past. Chicago and London: Th... more ESHEL, AMIR. Futurity: Contemporary Literature and the Quest for the Past. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2013. 368 pp. $36.16.
African American Review, Mar 22, 2007
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, a... more JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Humanities and Technology
Virtual Reality could be conceived as an extension or an alternative to our reality, akin to leav... more Virtual Reality could be conceived as an extension or an alternative to our reality, akin to leaving Plato's cave in order to more fully know the world. Mediated immersion has been the means by which such an extension is made possible. But instead of opening the horizons to alternative realities, such immersion-in the arts, gaming, and pedagogy-teaches us to appreciate how we experience the world we already know, where simulacra dominate, as understood by semiotic theory.
![Research paper thumbnail of Israeli SF 101 [Survey of Israeli Science Fiction]](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/61279849/thumbnails/1.jpg)
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Routledge eBooks, Jan 24, 2023
Science Fiction Studies, 2017
African American Review, 2016
Ishmael Reed's novel Mumbo Jumbo (1972) and Toni Morrison's Paradise (1998) stand as two ... more Ishmael Reed's novel Mumbo Jumbo (1972) and Toni Morrison's Paradise (1998) stand as two crucial signposts identifying the trajectory of an African American aesthetic. Central to the aesthetics of each is a subversion of the very process of historical or generic categorization that reduces the complexity of human experience to a simplified, linear catalogue of events or trends. The authors introduce a musical sensibility into their respective writings, expanding the literary palette, the effects of which emphasize the impotence of an exclusive, deterministic, and category-bound history and disrupting a linear strategy of historical narrative. Significantly, this musical sensibility is a jazz-based one and produces a jazz aesthetic that saturates Reed's and Morrison's works. Linking black fiction with blues and/or jazz music has, by now, an extensive scholarly history. (1) Although often widely varied in approach, this large body of scholarship has established a recog...
Introduction Donna Haraway‟s seminal article drafting the cyborg as a key metaphor for the anti-o... more Introduction Donna Haraway‟s seminal article drafting the cyborg as a key metaphor for the anti-original, inherently plural, and endlessly dynamic paradigm explaining the western culture of the late twentieth century still proves a potent image that resonates in more recent decades. Haraway‟s striking metaphor becomes literally manifest and productively fictionalized in the science fictional writing of Octavia Butler. Using Haraway‟s model as the theoretical basis for analysis, this article will offer a critical reading of Butler‟s work, exploring the intersection of racial, gendered, and generic considerations. To ground this theoretical context in the discourse of race and feminism which inevitably functions in a critical reading of Butler‟s work, I hope to productively complicate the cyborg metaphor through ideas articulated by bell hooks and Paul Gilroy. Hooks‟s writing offers a singular perspective on black feminism, which focuses on performativity as a perpetual process subver...
Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas
Science Fiction Film & Television
Journal of American Studies, 2005
The Department of English Language & Literature at the University of Haifa is pleased to announce... more The Department of English Language & Literature at the University of Haifa is pleased to announce a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship to join Slipping Sideways: Contemporaneity and Alternate Histories, an ongoing project funded by the Israeli Science Foundation, and conducted by Dr. Keren Omry.
Deadline: March 1, 2021
Duration: 1 year (possible option to extend to a second year)
James Baldwin and Toni Morrison: Comparative Critical and Theoretical Essays, 2006
Toni Morrison's A Mercy: Critical Approaches, 2011
CR: The New Centennial Review, 2019
In this article, I adopt two key terms, posthumanism and interbeings, to consider representations... more In this article, I adopt two key terms, posthumanism and interbeings, to consider representations of the politics, ethics, and aesthetics of the contemporary. Focusing on Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being (2013) and The Face: A Time Code (2015), I examine how literature, particularly speculative literature, challenges the stability of such categories as individual, character, fiction, Realism, and Humanism. The article examines the relationship of autobiography to time, time to authorship, and reader to text, showing how Ozeki seeks moral accounting for technology, recognising the embodied but changing, multiple human agent who has the capacity to retain ethical boundaries in a changing world.
Science Fiction Studies, 2016
Acting and Performance in Moving Image Culture: Bodies, Screens, Renderings. With a Foreword by Lesley Stern, 2012
James Baldwin and Toni Morrison, 2006
... BALDWINS BOP n'MORRISONS MOOD 19 struggles with the conflict of her ideological racism, the n... more ... BALDWINS BOP n'MORRISONS MOOD 19 struggles with the conflict of her ideological racism, the necessity of succumbing to racial stereotypes (in ... of their relationship, though the very attempt to overcome their differences and the true love they share indicate the hope of the ...
Studies in the Novel, 2015
ESHEL, AMIR. Futurity: Contemporary Literature and the Quest for the Past. Chicago and London: Th... more ESHEL, AMIR. Futurity: Contemporary Literature and the Quest for the Past. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2013. 368 pp. $36.16.
African American Review, Mar 22, 2007
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, a... more JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Humanities and Technology
Virtual Reality could be conceived as an extension or an alternative to our reality, akin to leav... more Virtual Reality could be conceived as an extension or an alternative to our reality, akin to leaving Plato's cave in order to more fully know the world. Mediated immersion has been the means by which such an extension is made possible. But instead of opening the horizons to alternative realities, such immersion-in the arts, gaming, and pedagogy-teaches us to appreciate how we experience the world we already know, where simulacra dominate, as understood by semiotic theory.
Cross-Rhythms investigates the literary uses and effects of blues and jazz in African-American li... more Cross-Rhythms investigates the literary uses and effects of blues and jazz in African-American literature of the twentieth century. Texts by James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Gayl Jones, Toni Morrison and Ishmael Reed variously adopt or are consciously informed by a jazz aesthetic; this aesthetic becomes part of a strategy of ethnic identification and provides a medium with which to consider the legacy of trauma in African-American history. These diverse writers are all thoroughly immersed in a socio-cultural context and a literary aesthetic that embodies shifting conceptions of ethnic identity across the twentieth century. The emergence of blues and jazz is, likewise, a crucial product of, as well as catalyst for, this context, and in their own aesthetic explorations of notions of ethnicity these writers consciously engage with this musical milieu. By examining the highly varied manifestations of a jazz aesthetic as possibly the fundamental common denominator which links these writers, this study attempts to identify an underlying unifying principle. As the different writers write against essentializing or organic categories of race, the very fact of a shared engagement with jazz sensibilities in their work redefines the basis of African-American communal identity.
Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being(2013) presents a case study which destabilizes materiality... more Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being(2013) presents a case study which destabilizes materiality not through a disembodied intellect, but, rather, by means of the notion of Schrödinger’s Cat, explores the quantum viability of the material body – that idea that statistically a body can be both dead and alive simultaneously, so long as it is not observed. In other words, the subject position is transferred from the protagonist to the witness, the scientist, in this case, the reader. The novel exposes a series of narrators, subjects, and readers as it challenges the feasibility of the historical tale. Couched within the covers of Proust’s Temps Perdue, the novel suggests that stability, certainty, and even the physicality of bodies and histories are simultaneously unstable and absolutely necessary to ensure historical accountability. This is not a tale invoking a postmodern flimsiness of History. Rather, through its bleak emphasis on the violence of nature but also of bullying, torture, war, and prostitution, the novel urges a complex concentration on the physical, not its abandonment, to produce a responsible History. By focusing on Ozeki’s novel, I hope to illustrate how literature, in particular SF literature, offers a unique place for these ideas to play out. The ironies of embodiment and of the possibilities of narrative, within textual representation, abound in a novel such as this which cleverly disrupts so many expectations of the Novel form while explicitly signalling its celebration of them. Unpacking some of these ideas in my talk, I hope to demonstrate how potent these ironies become when framed within a feminist discourse.