JWST 282 - American Jewish Literature

Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)

(Same as ENGL 282) This course is an exploration of the American Jewish literary imagination from historical, topical, and theoretical perspectives. Among the genres we will cover are novels (Anzia Yezierska’s Bread Givers), plays (Sholem Asch’s God of Vengeance), poems and stories (by Celia Dropkin, Isaac Baschevis Singer, Grace Paley, Irena Klepfisz, and Melanie Kaye-Kantrowitz, among others), graphic novels (Art Spiegelman’s Maus), comics (Superman and Batman), films (Woody Allen’s Zelig), artists’ books (Tatana Kellner’s Fifty Years of Silence), and theory (essays by Walter Benjamin, for example). Topics include the development of Jewish modernism and postmodernism, the influence of Jewish interpretive traditions on contemporary literary theory, 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. Mr. Antelyes.

Two 75-minute periods.