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A POSTMODERN READING OF BRENNER'S LAST STORY: MEHATHALA AS PARODIC HOMAGE

In this article, I seek to examine the story “From the Beginning” from its central poetic feature, that of a congestion of literary references. These references are drawn from other Hebrew stories—from the late 1800s and the beginning of the twentieth century—about rootless male characters and their “erotic failures.” The degree of concentration of literary innuendoes, the context and the method with which they are brought to bear on Brenner's narrative, result in a deliberate exaggeration that makes “From the Beginning” a “parodic homage” of these earlier texts and their characters, including types and situations previously encountered in Brenner's other stories. “From the Beginning,” with its features of intertextuality and irony, has the characteristics of a postmodern parody, or, at the very least, invites a postmodern re-reading.