Winter 2005 Advance Course Information

This information effective for Winter 2005. Check with instructor the first day of class for any changes.

Modern Literary Studies

[LTMO-144B]

144B: Modernity as Jewish Challenge and Catastrophe: The American Experience

Note: This syllabus from the previous time the course was taught. There will be a few changes in the Winter 2005 version. Students should note that the time of the course has been changed to MWF at 3:30-4:40 p.m.; the Winter 2005 hard copy of the schedule of classes does not reflect this change, but the online version is correct.

MWF 3:30-4:40 p.m.
Instructor: Bruce Thompson
Office: 276 Stevenson
Office Hours: Wed, Fri 9:45-11:15; Mon by appt
Phone: 459-3467
(brucet@ucsc.edu)

Course Description:

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 those great writers 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 (September 18-20)

Isaac Rosenfield, "The Situation of the Jewish Writer" (handout)
Arthur Hertzberg, "The Russian Jews Arrive," in The Jews in America
Abraham Cahan, Yekl and the Imported Bridegroom and Other Stories of Yiddish New York

2. A Little Love in Big Manhattan (September 23-27)

Arthur Hertzberg, "The Invention of the Jewish Mother," in The Jews in America
Henry Roth, Call It Sleep
Poems by Mani Lieb (1883-1953) and Moishe Leib Halpern (1886-1932)

3. Jews Without Money (September 30-October 4)

Arthur Hertzberg, "Children of the Ghetto," The Jews in America
Alfred Kazin, A Walker in the City (especially "The Kitchen")
Clifford Odets, Awake and Sing (film)

4. America and the Holocaust (October 7-11)

Arthur Hertzberg, "FDR: The Benevolent King of the Jews," in The Jews in America
Isaac Bashevis Singer, "The Last Demon," in Collected Stories
Cynthia Ozick, "The Shawl" (handout)
Rebecca Goldstein, "The Legacy of Rachel Kaidish" (handout)
Arthur Miller, Incident at Vichy

5. Lost in America: The End of Yiddish? (October 14-18)

Arthur Hertzberg, "After the War," in The Jews in America
Isaac Bashevis Singer, "Gimpel the Fool," "The Little Shoemakers," "Short Friday," "A Friend of Kafka," "The Cafeteria," "A Day in Coney Island," "The Cabalist of East Broadway," "Old Love," in Collected Stories
Poems by Aaron Zeitlin (1898-1973) and Jacob Glatstein (1896-1971)
Recommended: Cynthia Ozick, "Envy: or Yiddish in America," in Jewish American Literature: A Norton Anthology, ed. John Felstiner

6. The Melancholy City of Bernard Malamud (October 21-25)

Bernard Malamud, "The Magic Barrel" (audio) and The Assistant

7. From Suburbia to the West Bank: The Wrath of Roth (October 28-November 1)

Arthur Hertzberg, "The Conquest of the Suburbs" and "Turmoil at Home, Glory in Israel," in The Jews in America
Philip Roth, The Counterlife

8. Apocalypse Now: The End of the Line? (November 4-8)

Arthur Hertzberg, "The End of Immigrant Memory"
Saul Bellow, Ravelstein
Bruce Jay Friedman, "When You're Excused, You're Excused" (handout)

9. Legacies: The Multigenerational Novel (November 13-15)

Rebecca Goldstein, Mazel

10. The Twentieth Century Re-Visited (November 18-30)

Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

Requirements:

Three 6-page essays, due October 14, November 13, and December 2.

Recommended:

• Irving Howe, World of Our Fathers—the best book ever written about the great migration of Eastern European Jews to New York.
• Ruth Wisse, The Modern Jewish Canon—insightful chapters on Singer, Glatstein, both Roths, Bellow, and Ozick, among others.
• Mark Schechner, After the Revolution: Studies in the Contemporary Jewish Imagination—first-rate studies of American Jewish novelists, with an emphasis on the turn to psychology after the failure of Marxism. See also his collection of review-essays, The Conversion of the Jews.
• Morris Dickstein, "The Complex Fate of the Jewish American Writer," in Ideology and Jewish Identity in Israeli and American Literature, ed. Emily Budick—compare this fine short overview with his recent magisterial survey of American literature since the Second World War, Leopards in the Temple.
• "The Jewish Literary Revival," Tikkun 12 (November-December 1997)—an excellent survey of the new Jewish writers of the 1990s, with contributions by Melvin Jules Bukiet, Morris Dickstein, Rebecca Goldstein, Sanford Pinsker, Nessa Rapoport, Mark Schechner, and Steve Stern.
• Leslie Fiedler, Fiedler on the Roof and Collected Essays—provocative essays on Jewish themes by one of America's wild men of letters.
  

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