This course will explore the intersections of literary and familial structures in social and psychological contexts. It will study ideologies which both support and contest the family's cultural hegemony. Individual offerings might concentrate on mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, family romances, marriage, family and society. Readings will range from myth and fairy tale to some of the great family novels or dramas.
Winter 2013: Kritzman (2A)
The Jewish Family (Identical to Jewish Studies 27)
This course will explore the various narrative forms-novel, short story, essay, self-portraiture, drama-in which the Jewish family is represented. We will examine how the rhetorical configurations of texts describe the varieties of Jewishness and the significance of Jewish cultural identity in a cross-cultural context. Authors to be studied include Aleichem, Bellow, Finkelkraut, Freud, Ginzburg, Kafka, Kushner, Paley, Perec, Roth, and Singer. Dist: LIT. Kritzman.
