JWST 350 - Confronting Modernity

Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)

Topic for 2017/18a: American Jewish Literature. This course is an exploration of the American Jewish literary imagination from historical, topical, and theoretical perspectives. Among the genres we cover are novels (such as Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep, Philip Roth’s The Counterlife, and Dara Horn’s A Guide for the Perplexed), plays (Sholem Asch’s God of Vengeance), stories (by Isaac Bashevis Singer, Bernard Malamud, Grace Paley, Philip Roth, Melanie Kaye-Kantrowitz, and others), poems (by Celia Dropkin, Moyshe-Leyb Halpern, Irena Klepfisz, and others), essays (Adrienne Rich’s “Split at the Root”), artists’ books (Tana Kellner’s Fifty Years of Silence), and graphic collections (Vanessa Davis’s Make Me a Woman). Topics include the lineages of Talmudic hermeneutics and Midrash, the development of Yiddish American modernism, the (anti)conventions of queer Jewish literatures and the intersections of Jewishness and queerness, the possibilities and limitations of a diaspora poetics, and contemporary representations of the Holocaust. Peter Antelyes.

One 2-hour period.

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