In the wake of the spatial and affective turns in Literary Studies in general and the study of
Jewish literatures in particular this volume shifts focus from the extensity of exile and
return to the intensities of sense of place and belonging across a moving landscape of 20th and
20st century literatures Jewish and other. It brings together contemporary writers and
literary scholars who collectively map these intensities onto a bodily word world in transit
and textures of habitable readable space as passage. Works by Hélène Cixous Cécile Wajsbrot
Alex Epstein Almog Behar and Svetlana Boym explore sites made up of layers of passages
taking configurations of sayability and readability as forms poetic and political of
inhabiting the material world. The contributions by literary scholars explore the theoretical
potential of a mapping of such sites in studies of modalities of belonging and unbelonging in
modern and contemporary works of literature. The volume collects a collaborative investigation
of the exigencies and potentialities of sense of place and belonging through literature Jewish
and other. It offers a literary perspective on current debates in a variety of fields
including literary criticism human geography architectural theory and translation studies.
