Studies in Near Eastern-Western Literary Relations
Rewriting the Sacred: Modernity, Intertextuality, and the Traditional Jewish Library
This course will explore the uses, appropriations, and reclamations of Jewish traditional texts in the poetry and prose of the modernist era, particularly in Hebrew, Yiddish, and English literature. Our theoretical focus will be the ability of intertextual practices to effect change both in the source and the target text and their cultural contexts. Concentrating on rewritings of the biblical story of the Binding of Isaac (the Akeda, Genesis 22), we will trace the poetic and ideological workings of intertextuality in discursive practices as diverse as allusion, parody, translation, pastiche, and modern midrash. We will begin by outlining the history of this topos diachronically through rabbinic and medieval Jewish rewritings of the narrative, and its recurrences in Christian and Islamic discourse. We will focus more centrally, however, on the critical stance of twentieth century literary works toward child-sacrifice and martyrology in their national-ideological appropriations. Each seminar session will combine a discussion of theoretical texts with close readings of poems or short stories that engage the Akeda story. By the third week, students will be expected to contribute either theoretical or literary texts in their language of specialization to the course reader.
Texts will be supplied in the original and (where available) in translation. Students taking the class to fulfill requirements for a graduate seminar in Hebrew literature will be expected to work with the Hebrew original. Student collaboration is encouraged. Course requirements include one individual or group presentation and a seminar paper.
Required Texts:
Graham Allen, Intertextuality, London: Routledge, 2000.
Eds. Clayton and Rothstein, Influence and Intertextuality in Literary History, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991.
Course Reader, available at Instant Copying and Laser Printing, phone 704-9700. The reader will include articles on intertextuality by Ben-Porat, Bloom, Boyarin, Culler, Eco, Kristeva, Orr and others, as well as primary sources.