Tuesday, November 1st from 7:00 – 8:30 pm

JMC library, Case Hall

Elana Gomel’s latest novel Nightwood is a dark fairy tale centered on immigrant experience. The protagonist is Ukrainian. But the history that reverberates through the blood forests and human farmyards of the novel is the history that Jews recognize – in this respect Nightwood is a Jewish fantasy, even though there are no explicit Jewish references in it.

The talk will address Jewish history not as an agreed-upon narrative of national identity but rather as a haunted house of traumatic memories and apocalyptic premonitions. Dr. Gomel will argue that only by confronting ghosts of history can the cycle of violence be broken. And the only genre that brings us face to face with our monsters is fantasy.

Gomel’s fantasy, horror and science fiction stories featured in numerous magazines as well as several award-winning anthologies. Some of her recent fantasy novels include The Hungry Ones, The Cryptids (2019), and Black House (2021).

Elana Gomel is an associate professor at the Department of English and American Studies at Tel-Aviv University. She has taught and researched at Princeton, Stanford, University of Hong Kong, and Venice International University. She is the author of five academic books and numerous articles on subjects such as narrative theory, posthumanism, science fiction, Dickens, and Victorian culture. Among her books are Bloodscripts: Writing the Violent Subject (OSU Press, 2003), Narrative Space and Time: Representing Impossible Topologies in Literature (Routledge 2014), and Science Fiction, Alien Encounters, and the Ethics of Posthumanism: Beyond the Golden Rule (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2014).