Instructor: Jonathan Brent
Capped at 20 students.
Despite belonging to different nations, writing in different languages, and living in radically different socio-economic conditions, S. An-sky (Shlyome Rappoport, 1863-1920), Franz Kafka (1883-1924), and Tadeusz Kantor (1915-1990) produced master works—The Dybbuk (1913-1916; first performed, 1920), The Metamorphosis (1915), and Wielopole, Wielopole (1981)— that represented fundamental “distortions” of narrative, character, memory and tradition through which the cataclysmic reality of twentieth century East European, and especially Jewish, experience could be understood.
Through intensive, close reading of their works we will try to understand this reality, how their vision of it developed a powerful current in modern Jewish literary sensibility and became a key element in European literary modernism before WWII and in its half-life in post-War Europe and America.