How Does It Feel? Yiddish Literature and Emotions.

Catalog description

This course delves into the profound emotional landscapes depicted in modern Yiddish literature. Envy, rage, love, optimism, fickleness, all these and others will be our focus in this course. The study of literary texts will be blended with theoretical frameworks in order to achieve a comprehensive understanding of how affect and emotions are both portrayed in literature and understood through critical theory. We will read seminal works such as Cynthia Ozick's Envy; or Yiddish in America, which explores themes of jealousy and cultural displacement, and Uri Nissan Gnessin's In the Gardens, which thematizes love and existential despair. Taught in English.