What unites the work of writers as disparate in theme and style as Franz Kafka, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and Philip Roth? Does the poetry of Paul Celan or Nelly Sachs have any meaningful connection with the storytelling of Nachman of Breslov or Nathan Englander? The most obvious answer may be: all of these are Jewish writers. Less obvious, and perhaps of greater significance, is the question as to whether an aggregate body of works by Jewish writers amounts to a coherent object that we might call “Jewish literature.” While literary canons of the modern era have tended to take shape around the congruence of the national with the linguistic community, Jewish literature is a literature of diaspora—composed in a great variety of languages, not to mention genres, and under widely divergent social and political circumstances. On what, then, is the “Jewishness” of Jewish literature founded? Is it a quality emergent from the materials themselves, or is this coherence imposed upon the cultural artifacts it is contriving to assemble? How might the very proposition of a “Jewish literature” compel us to rethink how we organize, and thus how we interpret, literary objects?
In this course, we will read broadly in works of Jewish literature—from Kafka to Roth, Singer to Englander—as well as works about Jewish literature, asking how the very concept proposes different ways of thinking not only about genre and form, but also about minor literatures, national literatures, and the notion of a “world literature.” As we go, we will pair primary with secondary sources—including texts by David Damrosch, Dan Miron, Deleuze and Guattari, among others—in order to map the contours of what a Jewish literature could or should be. And moreover, we will ask: how do these debates about specifically Jewish literature navigate and inform how we think about literature tout court—about what it does (and when), who it’s for, how it separates, and what, if anything, it unites?
