ENG532: The Jewish Literary Imagination

Primo Levi's short story, "Quaestio de Centauris," describes a centaur living in exile from others like him in the human world. In her discussion of this story for a series in the New Yorker, Jhumpa Lahiri describes Levi's time in Auschwitz as "the most brutal form of exile" and later quotes Levi on the subject from The Truce when he writes: "This is the most immediate fruit of exile, of uprooting: the prevalence of the unreal over the real." The imaginative worlds of writers are necessarily influenced by their lived personal and inherited cultural experiences. In this class, we will consider the ways in which history, exile, and intergenerational inheritance shape the artistic worlds Jewish writers create. While the readings in this course will focus on a particular literary tradition, the course is relevant and welcoming to students of all cultural backgrounds. Writing assignments will ask students to reflect on their own lives and heritage, and the ways that history, culture, and diaspora hold meaning for them as community members, individuals, thinkers, and artists. Assignments will range from the personal (poem, essay, short story, visual work) to the collaborative (interview, documentary, ekphrasis, collage) inviting students to consider the forces that influence their own imaginations. Readings will include fiction by Clarice Lispector, Primo Levi, Grace Paley, Frantz Kafka, and Courtney Sender; poetry by Anthony Hecht, Adrienne Rich, and Joseph Brodsky; and criticism by Walter Benjamin, Svetlana Boym, and others. The course will include visiting lecturers from within and outside of the Phillips Exeter community.