Studies in Jewish American Literature

Catalog description

This course offers students a working analytical familiarity with the history of Jewish writing in the United States (in North American context) and with both the history and the current state of professional study of it. Attention will be paid both to dominant and alternative narratives of this literature. Major historical topics include the earliest, pre-19th century Jewish writers in America; 19th century Jewish American writers; writers of the great Ashkenazi immigration wave of 1881-1924; interwar proletarian and modernist writers; postwar writers of assimilation; the mainstreaming of Jewish American literature in the 1950s and 1960s; post-"breakthrough" Jewish American writers; and 21st-century Jewish American literature and the new immigration. The course analyzes the development of the professional field of Jewish American literary study, including its prehistory and origins in Wissenschaft-based historicism; the professionalization of the field in the Viet Nam era; the growing dominance of so-called New Jewish Cultural Studies of the `80s and `90s; and new theoretical approaches of the first decades of the 21st century. Finally, the course examines the key debates and faultlines in the field today, including the divide between historicist and critical approaches; differences between English Department-based and Jewish Studies-based Jewish American literary study; the situation of Jewish American literary study vis-à-vis Americanist literary study and English Department-based literary study more generally; Cultural Studies-based approaches to the field vs. Literary Studies-based approaches; Comparativist approaches vs. non-Comparativist approaches; the move toward interdisciplinarity; and the ongoing struggle to theorize the field.