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One of the major questions that the course will ask is if there is such a thing as Jewish writing. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's book Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature will serve as the starting point for the course, for they propose a theory that seeks to explain how minority groups construct stories, novels, and poems within a major language. Therefore, when Jewish writers compose their works, they inevitably challenge majority assumptions in German, Austrian, and American culture. Not only do they undermine Jewish stereotypes embedded in the majority culture, but they also ask: What does it mean to be German, Austrian, and American? Can we define a national character? Is there really such a thing as national character? Jewish writers such as Kafka, Celan, Canetti, Scholem, Benjamin, Malamud, Biller, Honigmann, Bellow, Ginsberg, and Roth have developed remarkable affinities that cut across German, Austrian and American cultures, and it will be the purpose of this course to study these affinities and determine whether there is such a thing as Jewish writing. In addition, the course will deal with the major crises of the twentieth century that have compelled Jewish writers to assume the role of outsider and rebel. Though this is not a Holocaust course per se, it will analyze how anti-Semitism in Europe and America led to the destruction of European Jewry and how Jewish writers have responded to this catastrophe and continue to do so in new works.