ENGL 282 - American Jewish Literature

Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)

(Same as JWST 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.

Prerequisite(s): open to sophomores, juniors, and seniors with one unit of 100-level work or by permission of the associate chair. Students applying for permission to elect 200-level work must present samples of their writing to the associate chair. Freshmen with AP credit may elect 200-level work after consultation with the department and with the permission of the instructor. First-year students who have completed ENGL 101 may elect 200-level work with permission of the instructor. Intermediate writing courses are not open to Freshmen.

Two 75-minute periods.