Course information
This short course offers an introduction to Yiddish literature through close readings of short stories in English translation. Designed as a taster course, it introduces students to the richness and diversity of Yiddish literary culture: from the formation of the modern canon, through modernist Yiddish women’s writing, to post-Holocaust and contemporary literature. Each session is devoted to one or two authors and consists of an introductory lecture followed by seminar discussion and ḥavruta close reading. Authors are presented through their biographies, major works, and literary philosophies, as well as through their afterlives in popular culture and cultural memory (film, visual art, music, exhibitions). The course situates Yiddish literature within broader geopolitical, historical, and philosophical developments across Eastern Europe, the Americas, and the postwar diaspora.
About the Teacher
Urszula Chowaniec is a literary scholar specialising in women’s writing, feminist literary criticism, Jewish history and identity in literature, Yiddish women’s writing, and contemporary lesbian literature. Her research combines close textual analysis with memory and trauma studies, migration studies, and cultural history, with particular attention to multilingualism (Polish, Yiddish, Swedish, and English) and transnational literary circulation. She is widely recognised for her contributions to the study of women’s literary modernity in Central and Eastern Europe and for her sustained engagement with Jewish women’s voices before and after the Holocaust. She is the author of Melancholic Migrating Bodies in Contemporary Women’s Writing (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015), which examines contemporary Polish women’s prose through the lenses of corporeality, melancholy, and migration, and W poszukiwaniu kobiety. O wczesnych powieściach Ireny Krzywickiej (In Search for a Woman: On the Early Novels of Irena Krzywicka, Universitas, 2007), a key reference for interwar Polish prose and feminist literary history.