JWST 350 - Confronting Modernity

Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)

Advanced study in selected aspects of religion and contemporary philosophical and political theory. May be taken more than once for credit when content changes.

Topic for 2021/22a: Jews, Comics, and Graphic Novels. An in-depth exploration of the contributions of Jewish writers and artists to the field of comics and graphics novels from historical, regional, and topical perspectives. Issues and texts may include: Jews, Assimilation, Aniconism, and the Comics: the Jewish creation of the American superhero (Superman, Funnyman, and the Golem); Reading/Writing in Jewish: satire from a Jewish eye (Jules Feiffer’s Voice comics); Gender: Second Wave feminism and the rise of the Jewish woman’s graphic novel (Aline Kominsky’s Love that Bunch and Diane Noomin’s Didi Glitz), contemporary women’s graphic art (Keren Katz’s “My Skeleton Week,” Liana Finck’s A Bintel Brief, and Vanessa Davis’s Make Me a Woman); History: reimagining the great migration (Leela Corman’s Unterzakhn), comics and the Holocaust (Spiegelman’s Maus); Place: the graphic novel from and in Israel (Rutu Modan’s The Property and Miriam Libicki’s Jobnik!), Jewish comics and urban nostalgia (Ben Katchor’s Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer), Jews in Europe and Northern Africa (Joann Sfar’s The Rabbi’s Cat). Materials also include criticism and theory from media and comics studies, among other approaches. Peter Antelyes.

Topic for 2021/22b: On Recollecting. Dispersion, exile, exposure, on the one hand, repair, return, recollection, on the other: dialectical poles of Jewish thought, historical experience and cultural production. This course focuses on re-collecting (the re- presupposes a prior dispersion) through an examination of several interrelated, architectural thought-images (to use Walter Benjamin’s term) of circulation and storage: the library, the arcade and the genizah (a traditional burial place for documents that bear the name of God and so may not be destroyed when they are no longer fit for use). This array leads to consideration of the organization and retrieval of knowledge, of commerce, in several senses, and of the afterlife, which is to say survival. The authors to be studied include art historian Aby Warburg, founder of a famous private research library, and poet Adrienne Rich, theorist of materialist history Benjamin and historian Francesca Trivellato; philosopher Jacques Derrida and memoirist Elias Canetti, and novelists Hélène Cixous, Amitav Ghosh and Myriam Moscona. Andrew Bush.

One 2-hour period.

Course Format: CLS