Study of selected Jewish languages including Hebrew and Yiddish, and Jewish literature including prose, poetry, and drama, from various periods and geographic areas, in the context of time and place. Selections may vary from semester to semester depending on the interests and expertise of the instructor.

What does it mean to remain awake? In an age marked by burnout, digital overstimulation, political crisis, anxiety, and the increasing demand for perpetual productivity, questions of rest and sleeplessness have become newly urgent. This course explores these questions through a wide range of literary, philosophical, and psychoanalytic texts, with particular attention to Hebrew and Jewish literary traditions (in translation - no language skills needed), which have long been intensely preoccupied with the tensions between wakefulness and sleep. Moving between biblical scenes of dreaming and revelation, modern Jewish political movements organized around the rhetoric of “national awakening,” and modern Hebrew literature, we will examine how writers have imagined sleep, fatigue, and reverie as sites of imaginative and relational possibility.

Our readings will include, among others, texts by Virginia Woolf, Clarice Lispector, Ronit Matalon, Amalia Kahana-Carmon, and Dahlia Ravikovitch, alongside thinkers such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sigmund Freud, Wilfred Bion, Jonathan Crary, and scholars associated with Critical Rest Studies, we will ask why literature persistently returns to states of sleep and withdrawal, and what forms of knowledge might emerge from them. While dreams have occupied a central place in philosophy and psychoanalysis, sleep itself has often remained in the background. We will ask, then, what might emerge if we take sleep seriously not merely as the container of dreams, but as a mode of being, relation, and thought. Along the way, we will consider whether literature itself produces altered states of attention that unsettle the opposition between wakefulness and sleep, and whether reading may at times resemble forms of drifting and surrender.

Repeat Rules

Requirements class fulfills