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Fall 2002
This information effective
for Fall 2002.
Check with instructor the first day of class for any changes.
Fall 2002
Instructor: Dick Terdiman
This course will consider four novels from the European tradition that explore and examine the way individuals conceive of social reality and react to its changing stresses:
Novels written in languages other than English will be read in translation. Combined lecture and discussion. Two written exercises during the quarter.
Instructor: Bruce Thompson
(brucet@cats.ucsc.edu)
Office: 276 Stevenson
Hours: Monday @ 12:30-1:30; Friday @ 9:30-10:30
Phone: 459-3467
Note: This is the syllabus for last year's version of LTMO-144B. Next year's version will be slightly different and will certainly include Michael Chabon's prize-winning novel The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.
It's impossible to imagine modern American literature without the cluster of gifted American Jewish writers who appeared at mid-century: Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow, Isaac Bashevis Singer (writing in Yiddish), Norman Mailer, and Philip Roth. And before they made their debuts, Henry Roth had brought Joycean techniques into American fiction, Clifford Odets had rejuvenated the American theater, and Nathanael West had turned the American dream into an apocalyptic nightmare. More recently, a new generation of American Jewish writers, led by women, has made fresh contributions to the canon. And yet this flowering of literature written by American Jews has taken place in a period when, it has been argued, "a coherent and identifiable Jewish culture and religion have effectively ceased to exist except in special enclaves" (Mark Shechner). How do we explain the central role of fiction written by Americans of Jewish descent in modern American literature, particularly when Jewish identity in America has suffered considerable erosion?
Certainly part of the explanation is that American Jewish writers have been especially sensitive to historical change and in particular to the series of catastrophes that make up so much of 20th-century history. This course examines responses by Jewish-American writers to a series of crises: massive immigration in the first decades of the century, the Great Depression of the 1930s, the Holocaust, McCarthyism and the persecution of the Left in the 1950s, the cultural and political fallout of the 1960s, tensions in the relationship between Jewish and African Americans, and the relationship with Israel and the problem of Jewish identity at the end of the century.
1. Immigrant Narratives
(March 28)
Arthur Hertzberg, "The Russian Jews Arrive," in The Jews in America
A Bintl Briv (A Bundle of Letters), Jewish American Literature: A
Norton Anthology
Abraham Cahan, "A Ghetto Wedding," in Norton Anthology
Cynthia Ozick, "Envy, or Yiddish in America," in Norton Anthology
Bernard Malamud, "The Magic Barrel," in Norton Anthology
2. Immigrant Families
(April 2-4)
Arthur Hertzberg, "The Invention of the Jewish Mother," in The
Jews in America
Alfred Kazin, "The Kitchen," in Norton Anthology
Henry Roth, Call It Sleep
Mary Antin, "The Lie," in Norton Anthology (recommended)
Anna Yezierska, "Children of Loneliness" in Norton Anthology
(recommended)
3. Jews Without Money:
The 1930s (April 9-11)
Michael Gold, "Fifty Cents a Night," in Norton Anthology
Clifford Odets, Awake and Sing!, in Norton Anthology
Nathanael West, "International Jewish Bankers and Bolsheviks," in
Norton Anthology
S. J. Perelman, "Nathanael West: A Portrait," in Norton Anthology
4. Hooray for Hollywood!
(April 16-18)
Nathanael West, The Day of the Locust
Daniel Fuchs, "A Hollywood Diary," in Norton Anthology
First Paper Due: April 18
5. America and the Holocaust
(April 23-25)
Arthur Hertzberg, "FDR: The Benevolent King of the Jews"
Isaac Bashevis Singer, "A Wedding in Brownsville" (reader)
Singer, "A Party in Miami Beach," in Schocken Book of Contemporary
Jewish Fiction, ed. Ted Solotaroff & Nessa Rappaport
Singer, Enemies: A Love Story
Cynthia Ozick, "The Shawl" in Norton Anthology
Rebecca Goldstein, "The Legacy of Rachel Kaidish" (reader)
Lore Segal, "The Reverse Bug," in Schocken Book (recommended)
Deirdre Levinson, "April 19th, 1985," in Schocken Book (recommended)
6. Red Scare and Blacklist
(April 30-May 1)
Arthur Hertzberg, "After the War"
Norman Mailer, "The Man Who Studied Yoga" (reader)
Woody Allen, "No Kaddish for Weinstein" (reader)
Abraham Polonsky and Jules Dassin, interviews in Tender Comrades (reader)
Abraham Polonsky, Force of Evil (film)
Second Paper Due: May 7
7. The Sixties I
(May 7-9)
Arthur Hertzberg, "With JFK, To Power"
Philip Roth, American Pastoral
8. The Sixties II
(May 14-16)
Bruce Jay Friedman, "When You're Excused, You're Excused" (Norton
Anthology)
Saul Bellow, Mr. Sammler's Planet
9. Blacks and Jews
(May 21-23)
Bernard Malamud, "The Angel Levine" (reader) and The Tenant
(reader)
Irving Howe, "Black Boys and Native Sons" (reader)
Ralph Ellison, "The World and the Jug" (reader)
Cynthia Ozick, "Literary Blacks and Jews" (reader)
Norman Mailer, "The White Negro" (reader)
James Baldwin, "The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy" (reader)
Grace Paley, "Zagrowsky Tells," in Schocken Book (recommended)
Saul Bellow, "Looking for Mr. Green" (reader) (recommended)
10. Israel and Identity
(May 30)
Arthur Hertzberg, "Turmoil at Home, Glory in Israel" and "Conclusion:
The End of Immigrant Memory"
Joanna Spiro, "Three Thousand Years of Your History …," in Schocken
Book
Nessa Rappoport, "The Woman Who Lost Her Names," in Schocken Book
Eppie Zore'a, "Orchards," in Schocken Book
Lynne Sharon Schwartz, "The Melting Pot," in Schocken Book
Third Paper Due: June 5
Fall Quarter 2002
Instructor: Margaret Brose
An examination of the major
Jewish writers in Italy, focusing on Judaism between the World Wars and under
Fascism; the Resistance; ghetto cultures of Rome, Turin, Ferrara, Venice; gender
roles; and development of new literary genres. Among authors to be read: Italo
Svevo, Alberto Moravia, Giorgio Bassani, Carlo Levi, Primo Levi, Natalia Ginzburg,
Alexander Stille, and Rita Levi Montalcini. Films, poetry, and cultural documents.
Requirements: Class participation; oral presentations; two short papers (5 pages); one final paper (6-8 pages). Enrollment limited to 25 students; priority given to juniors and seniors.
Week I: Introduction to
course. Brief history of Jews in Italy; from Middle Ages to 20th century; Spanish
Jews from the Iberian peninsula (1490s); development of ghettos in papal States
(1555); emancipation of Jews from northern ghettos by Pope Pius IX in 1848.
Readings: selected essays in reader.
Week II: The debate about
Italian anti-Semitism (Benedetto Croce, 1943: "there was no folly called
anti-Semitism"). Italy before Fascism. The Venetian Ghetto. (Poetry of
Renaissance poet Sara Sulam). Reading: The Confessions of Zeno, Italo
Svevo. Video: "The Venetian Ghetto"
Week III: Unredeemed Italy:
Trieste at the brink of WW I. Reading: Italo Svevo, The Confessions of Zeno;
poetry of Umberto Saba. Fascist racial laws of 1938. Film: A Special Day
(Ettore Scola, 1977)
Week IV: Rome: the ghetto
and the assimilation of Indifference. Reading: Alberto Moravia, selected essays
(Man as an End): The Time of Indifference. Film: The Conformist
(Bertolucci, 1970)
Week V: Ferrara: the ghetto
without walls. Reading: Giorgio Bassani, The Garden of the Finzi-Contini.
Film: The Garden of the Finzi-Contini (De Sica, 1971)
Week VI: Anti-fascism, exile,
and the question of the Mezzogiorno (South) in the 1930s: Carlo Levi, Christ
Stopped at Eboli.
Week VII: Witnessing: Gender
and Fascism. Reading: Natalia Ginzburg, The Things We Used to Say
Week VIII: Witnessing: writing
from the camps. Reading: Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz. Video: "Decoding
Nazi Secrets"
Week IX: Selections from
Alexander Stille, Benevolence and Betrayal: Five Italian Jewish Families
Under Fascism (NY: Summit Books, 1991). Film: Life is Beautiful (Roberto
Begnini, 1998)
Week X. Conclusion: History
of a word: "ebreo": Selections from: Rosetta Loy, First Words;
and Rita Levi Montalcini, In Praise of Imperfection
Required texts:
Reader (selections):
Book in Italian on reserve:
De Felice, Renzo, Storia degli erbei italiani sotto fascismo (Turin:
Einaudi, 1972)
Milano, A., Storia degli ebrei in Italia (Turin: Einaudi, 1963)
Films:
A Special Day (Ettore Scola, 1977)
The Conformist (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1970)
The Garden of the Finzi-Contini (Vittorio De Sica, 1971)
Life is Beautiful (Roberto Begnini, 1998)
Videos: "The Venetian Ghetto" and "Decoding Nazi Secrets"
Stevenson 217
Thursday 2-5 p.m.
Instructor: Loisa Nygaard
nygaard@cats.ucsc.edu
Office: Kresge 188
A study of formative developments
in the aesthetics of landscape as they relate to political struggles over the
possession of land and the emerging ideologies of industrial capitalism. Readings
will include Burke, Kant, Schiller, Goethe, Alexander von Humboldt, Jane Austen,
Mary Shelley, Ann Bermingham, Edward Said, Mary Louise Pratt, Raymond Williams,
Terry Eagleton, and Henri Le Febvre.
The 18th century—which
gave us the very word "aesthetics"—was a critical formative period
in aesthetic thought. To a large extent, the aesthetics of this period was an
aesthetics of landscape—one need only think of the writings of Burke and
Kant on the beautiful and the sublime or of Gilpin and others on the picturesque.
This course will relate these new aesthetic theories to the politics of land
at this time: the enclosure movement in Great Britain, the moves toward freeing
the peasants in Germany and France, the French Revolution, and the ongoing process
of colonial conquest and exploitation. The growing importance of trade and commerce
in this period made land less significant as the foundation of the economic
order, freeing it for aesthetic appropriation. The shift to new capitalist modes
of organizing the rural economy and the rise of a new, more narrowly defined
concept of private property were also crucial preconditions for the rise of
this new sense of landscape. The aesthetic theories of the later 18th century
were intimately entwined with the new emerging ideologies of industrial capitalism.
The course will conclude
with a look at the another related development in the 18th century: the "scientific"
voyage of exploration and discovery in which the stated aim was to acquire knowledge
rather than to conquer or claim territory. In such ventures, the European traveler
tended to rely heavily on aesthetic categories in formulating his or her response
not only to new lands, but also to their inhabitants, who were all too often
viewed as merely another feature of the landscape.
While this course will focus
primarily on the 18th century, it will be designed so that students may accommodate
its interests and concerns to their own projected plan of study, exploring,
for example, the ongoing expropriation of land from peasants in Mexico and its
literary and artistic resonances; or images of the land in paintings or photographs
of the American wilderness; or the portrayal of landscape in the 19th century
narratives of nation-formation in Latin America; or Dutch landscape painting
in relation to Dutch imperialism; or recent photography in the Middle East,
the most prominent of the many places around the globe where questions of land
and the possession of land continue to be a matter of life and death.