RUSSIAN 425 - 20th Century Russian Jewish Literature and Culture:Text,Canvas,Screen

Institution:

Reed College

Subject:

Description:

Full course for one semester. This course examines the problem of Jewish literature and the Jewish artist in the 20th century through investigating the Russian Jewish literary, artistic, and intellectual imagination since the early 1900s. While the Russian Jewish 20th-century artists felt themselves to be completely in and of the Russian tradition, shaping and revising it, their understanding of this tradition and the role of the Russian writer was challenged and complicated both by their sense of their Jewishness, and the overall project of modern Jewish artistic self-fashioning. We examine how these artists creatively approached their Jewishness and conceived of their place in Russian (and Soviet) literature and culture. We ask whether the Russian Jewish texts can be seen as forming a separate tradition and scrutinize various methodologies of defining a literary text in a non-Jewish language as Jewish. We pay close attention to ideological, historic, cultural, linguistic, and aesthetic contexts of the discourses involved: Russian modernist, Hebrew and Yiddish modernist, Soviet, dissident, and post-Soviet. Readings from Jabotinsky, Knut, Dubnow, Mandelshtam, Bagritsky, Babel, Ehrenburg, Grossman, Gorenshtein, Slutsky, and others. Prerequisite: students who wish to take the course for Russian credit must have completed Russian 220 or obtain the consent of the instructor. Lecture-conference. Cross-listed as Literature 425. Not offered 2009-10. Literature 425 Description

Credits:

3.00

Credit Hours:

Prerequisites:

Corequisites:

Exclusions:

Level:

Instructional Type:

Lecture

Notes:

Additional Information:

Historical Version(s):

Institution Website:

www.reed.edu

Phone Number:

(503) 771-1112

Regional Accreditation:

Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities

Calendar System:

Semester

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