Seminar-style treatment of a major topic in Comparative Literature. Substantial paper required.

Hebrew literature is a hybrid creature with no stable home. Historically developed in exile by people navigating between languages and cultures, it emerged from a “living-dead” language that experienced both death and resurrection. To this day, Hebrew literature exists in a constant state of in-betweenness, carrying the weight of historical trauma and an intensely contentious present. This course examines Hebrew literature’s liminal status through a psychoanalytic lens, focusing particularly on the psychoanalytic school of object relations and its conception of intersubjectivity—the understanding that neither people nor texts exist as autonomous, self-sufficient entities, but rather in perpetual relation to others. We will explore the inter-relationality between Hebrew and its historical and contemporary linguistic encounters, from its ancient dialogue with Aramaic to its modern interactions with Yiddish, Arabic, and English, as well as its self-positioning between diaspora and homeland, exile and return, margins and center. Our theoretical framework draws on psychoanalytic thinkers such as Wilfred Bion, Donald Winnicott, Christopher Bollas, and Thomas Ogden, examining how therapeutic concepts like “the third,” “the unthought known,” “the transitional space,” and the “intermind” may help us in literary analysis. Through close readings of works by authors such as Amalia Kahana-Carmon, David Grossman, and Maya Arad—written both in Israel, where Hebrew serves as the official national language, and in the diaspora—we’ll investigate how Hebrew literature challenges our notion of self-contained individuality and explore the implications and practice of reading through an intersubjective lens.

Grades will be calculated as follows:
Attendance and participation - 20%
Midterm paper (Close Reading, 4-5 pages) - 20%
Pre-Class Questions – 25%
Final Essay - 35%

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