Department of English

    Can a cartoon be deep?  What kind of movie is more than four hours
 long?  Every medium of representation has its own
 technology and its own style, but how is the medium the message?  As
 we think about what it means to re-present, we will follow
 representations of Jewishness as these representations intersect with
 other issues such as state authority, family dynamics, women's rights,
 class struggles, racial praxes, and more.
     Jewish depictions animate the works we will be studying in this
 course, but otherwise these works have little in common.  We will probe
 shifting Jewish portrayals on a journey through different genres: short
 stories, novels, plays, movies, poetry, personal journals, a medieval
 manuscript, and even a cartoon book.  Authors we will discuss include:
 Shakespeare, Philip Roth, Art Spiegelmann, Jean Paul Sartre, Anzia
 Yezierska, E.L. Doctorow, Adrienne Rich, Claude Lanzmann, Anne Frank, and
 Franz Kafka.