Syllabus
Course: Dancing about Architecture: Jewish Humor and
the Construction of Cultural Discourse
Instructor:
Marc Caplan, a Krieger School professor
of Yiddish Language, Literature, and Culture
Course description: This course offers an
advanced-undergraduate examination of literary, theatrical,
cinematic, and televised representations of Jewish culture.
The course considers the joke as a mode of narration and
cultural coding with specific resonances for the Jewish
encounter with modernity. Topics addressed include the
origins of modern Jewish humor; the problems of anxiety and
otherness articulated through humor; and the significance
of Jews in creating popular culture through the mass media.
Note: This will be a course about humor, and as such
we will not be able, or willing, to censor the material we
will be considering — much of which will be profane,
offensive, sexually explicit, and trading heavily in
a variety of ethnic, religious, racial, and gender
stereotypes, sometimes figured ironically and other times
literally.
Reading list:
Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, by
Sigmund Freud
Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, by
Henri Bergson
Landmark Yiddish Plays: A Critical Anthology, by
Joel Berkowitz and Jeremy Dauber (eds.)
Adventures of Mottel: The Cantor's Son, by Sholem
Aleichem
Metamorphosis and Other Stories, by Franz Kafka
Portnoy's Complaint, by Phillip Roth
The Insanity Defense: The Complete Prose, by Woody
Allen