Session 1: Chairperson, Na’ama Rokem (The University of Chicago)
Brian McHale (The Ohio State University), “A Map of Misreading, or, How Etgar Keret Got Postmodernism Wrong and Reinvented Israeli Fiction” Christopher Merrill (The University of Iowa), “Parallel Universes: The Worlds of Etgar Keret” Takafumi Akimoto (Konan University, Japan), “Etgar Keret, Haruki Murakami and World Literature: The Possibility of Translation” Vered Karti Shemtov (Stanford University) interviews author Etgar Keret Session 2: Chairperson, Yiftach Ofek (The University of Chicago) Paper 1: Adia Mendelson-Maoz (The Open University of Israel), “Keret’s Living Dead and the Sacrifice of Israeli Masculinity” Paper 2: Nurit Buchweitz (Beit Berl College), “Vitalities and Fatalities in Relationships in Keret’s Graphic Texts (Streets of Rage, Nobody Said It Was Going To Be Fun, Pizzeria Kamikaze) Paper 3: Roman Katsman (Bar-Ilan University), “Etgar Keret’s Laughter: The Unbearable Lightness of Banality, or, What is Israeli Humor?” Session 3: Chairperson, Paper 1: Yigal Schwartz (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev), “Etgar Keret’s World: Repetition, Morality, and Postmodernism” Paper 2: Vered Karti Shemtov (Stanford University), “Being Stuck in the Continuous Present: Etgar Keret and Contemporary Hebrew Literature” Roundtable Discussion – Chairperson, Vered Karti Shemtov Keret story “Lieland” (read in Hebrew by Etgar Keret) Paper 1: Dekel Shay Schory (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev) Paper 2: Shoshana Olidort (Stanford University) Paper 3: Michal Peles Almagor (The University of Chicago) Paper 4: Eyal Bassan (University of California, Berkeley)