Two of the 20th century Hebrew poets, Uri Zvi Greenberg and Avot Yeshurun  present a broad poetic corpus which fuses individual and political elements into a sharp statement on personal and national identity.

The course will discuss both poetries, their reception, how they related to each other and the dualistic, unstable place they occupied both in the mainstream and on the fringes of Israeli poetry in their lifetime and after. We will examine the residues of the personal and national traumas that affected the poets, the different traces they left in their poetry, as well as surprising similarities, and explore their revolutionary, relentlessly groundbreaking and maverick nature. We will follow their seeking character and the artistic, personal and political questions they bring up concerning issues such as home, family, diaspora, Homeland, religion, political stand and language. 

The theoretical background of the course will be mostly psychoanalysis: Freud, Klein, Winnicott, Lacan, Kristeva, Deleuze and Guattari, Fellman and others.