Draft:Ari Ofengenden

Ari Ofengenden is a literary theorist who works on Modern Poetry, Ideology and Social history of Culture. He is a professor at Tulane University and has written articles on Jewish-German writers, psychoanalysis, capitalism, and culture. He is the editor of monograph series of books in comparative cultural studies at Purdue University Press.

Biography
Ari Ofengenden was born in Tel-Aviv. He received his B.A in behavioral science, and an M.A in cognitive linguistics testing George Lakoff theory of metaphor. His Ph.d was devoted to language and absence in Hebrew modernist poet Abraham Shlonsky.

The Passion for Absence in Abraham Shlonsky: Aesthetics of Negativity in Hebrew Poetry
First monograph, The Passion for Absence in Abraham Shlonsky: Aesthetics of Negativity in Hebrew Poetry (De Gruyter Press 2015), is devoted to the poet Abraham Shlonsky (1900-1973), language innovator and architect of Hebrew modernism. Written as a social history of poetry, the book gives a new and comprehensive interpretation of his poetry as underwritten by a desire of the poetic speaker to redeem experiences of mass migration, political displacement, and loss of faith, using a precise, chiseled yet playfully enigmatic style.

Liberalization and Culture in Contemporary Israel
His second book is Liberalization and Culture in Contemporary Israel (Rowman & Littlefield 2018). The book provides a social and economic history of Israeli cultural production since the 1970’s. It analyzes the rapidly changing media spheres in Israel including films, television series, novels, and social media. It examines the way that main stream culture as well as the Palestinian minority in Israel have transformed since the 1970’s. The book reintegrates Israeli cultural history within the framework of the world transition to knowledge economy and neo-liberalism.

The Ruling Ideas
The third book, The Ruling Ideas (2023) attempts to make the critique of ideology accessible to the general public. The book examines specific ideas that are used to legitimize hierarchy, such the entrepreneurial self, utility oriented economic man, technological progress, abstract virtues and values, God, nation, race, and family values. The book shows how these ideas are embedded in the media, literature, film, institutions, motivational speakers, business gurus, films, but also in the actions people take in their everyday lives and even more deeply in the experience of who they are.

Among his articles:
“Subjectivity, Institutions and Language in Contemporary Israeli Film”

Comparative Literature and Culture, March 2019.

“Minoritarian Interventions and National Identity: Reading Amos Oz with Sayed Kashua,” Hebrew Studies, November 2016.

“Monotheism the Incomplete Revolution: Narrating the Event in Freud’s and Assmann’s Moses” Symploke, November 2015.

“National Identity in Global Times: Therapy and Satire in Contemporary Israeli Film and Literature” The Comparatist, October 2015.

“Agency, Desire, and Power in Schnitzler's A Dream Novel and Kubrick's Adaptation Eyes Wide Shut” Comparative Literature and Culture, June, 2015.

“Language, Body, Dystopia: The Passion for the Real in Orly-Castle-Bloom’s Dolly City”, The Comparatist, October 2014.

“‘Days will Come and They will Demand an Account. What will I Give?’: The Dynamics of Secularization in Abraham Shlonksy's Writings”, Hebrew Studies, November 2010.

“Ideology and Poetry: On Abraham Shlonsky's Hegemony in the Hebrew Poetry of the 30's,” Hebrew Studies, November 2006.