2012-2013 Academic Catalog

May 05, 2024

2012-2013 Academic Catalog [ARCHIVED CATALOG]

HIST 296 - Between History and Memory

Type of Course: Seminar

The dramatic events of the twentieth century produced a flood of Jewish autobiographies, itself an unprecedented phenomenon in Jewish culture which is otherwise almost entirely bereft of an autobiographical tradition. Why were twentieth-century Jews so drawn to this particular form? How did the turn to autobiography transform the meaning of Jewish experience? Placing special emphasis on the methodological implications, for both history and psychology, of using autobiographies to reconstruct the past, this interdisciplinary seminar addresses the relationship between collective and individual self-fashioning evident in Jewish autobiographical experiments throughout the twentieth century. Through close readings of key autobiographical texts produced throughout the Jewish world, we will explore how their authors handled the palpable tensions between their own private memories and the tradition of public history that they inherited as readers of canonic Jewish texts. We will explore the ways in which autobiographies both affirm and subvert contemporary assumptions about the Jewish experience of modernity and the nature of the Jewish response to catastrophe.