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Speaker(s): Prof. Karen Grumberg

The Hebrew Workshop has invited Professor Karen Grumberg (UT Austin) to talk about her new book, Hebrew Gothic: History and the Poetics of Persecution. 
 
Sinister tales written since the early 20th century by the foremost Hebrew authors, including S. Y. Agnon, Leah Goldberg, and Amos Oz, reveal a darkness at the foundation of Hebrew culture. Reading these works together with central British and American gothic texts in her new book Hebrew Gothic, Karen Grumberg argues that modern Hebrew literature has regularly appropriated key gothic ideas to help conceptualize the Jewish relationship to the past and, more broadly, to time. She considers why these authors were drawn to the gothic, originally a European mode associated with antisemitism, and how they use it to challenge assumptions about power and powerlessness, vulnerability and violence, and to shape modern Hebrew culture.
Karen Grumberg is Associate Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature in the Department of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, where she also serves as Director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies and the Faculty Coordinator for Israel Studies in the Schusterman Center for Jewish Studies. She is the author of Place and Ideology in Contemporary Literature (Syracuse UP, 2011) and of Hebrew Gothic: History and the Poetics of Persecution (Indiana UP, 2019).
 
A light lunch will be served. We look forward to seeing you there.