This course will explore the connection, in self-consciously Jewish contemporary fiction, between the Judaic ban on idolatry and the intersections of ethics, power, and representation. The texts we will read pursue such an exploration in relation to questions of art and ethics, rationalism and faith, mimesis and technological reproduction, celebrity and identity, myth-making and cybernetic capabilities, among others. They all connect the Judaic critique of idolatry to the varied Jewish responses to fundamental issues of contemporary Jewish existence, such as the Holocaust, Zionism, and assimilation. They all thereby suggest that Jewishness, rather than simply an ethnic identity, might provide ways of reading the dominant Enlightenment discourses and of enhancing some of those discourses' liberating possibilities. |