Literature of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Diaspora, migration, displacement, globalization, and translation – in recent years these phenomena have become the prime focus of studies across the humanities. Modern Yiddish literature, a literature in constant global movement, opens up the opportunity to investigate these themes across a diverse range of historical and geographical contexts. In this course we will learn about the culture and history of Yiddish-speaking, Eastern European Jews through works of literature and art that focus on movement. We will follow a far-reaching global itinerary – from the Russian Empire’s Pale of Jewish Settlement to New York City’s Lower East Side, and from remote colonies in the Soviet Far East to Western European capitals, to Palestine, Latin America, the US South, South Africa, and beyond – to see what the world looks like from the Yiddish perspective. Reading across the Yiddish literary canon (as well as some less well-known works), we will be particularly interested in the following questions: How do works of literature make sense of the world, nation-state, collective, assimilation, belonging and estrangement? How do they make sense of different experiences of movement – displacement, domestic migration, back-and-forth diasporic movement, or a hopeful immigration to a promised land? How are gender and race transformed in global migration, in the encounter with new cultures? And how is a loss of languages, or acquiring of new languages, affect literary production?
Readings will be provided in the original and in English translation.

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