The seminar will feature David Grossman as a modernist writer in a postmodern era, in terms of both the cultural dominant, and the literary atmosphere. We'll read Grossman's novels and non-fiction prose with two aims in mind: 1. The description of Grossman's poetics as a consisent and developing set of literary choices, a set consisting of interelated choices in terms of plots, protagonists, language, background, and ethics which fuse into a rich yet consistent poetic world. 2. A description of Grossman in the context of the present cultural atmosphere as a writer fluctuating between a modernist world, where the writer may still be a moral beacon, and the equivocal, fluctuating postmodern one in which we all live.