The course will study those twentieth-century Jewish writers, thinkers, and theoreticians who write allegories concerning the impossibility of writing, or who explore theoretically the inadequacy of language, or who associate words with indeterminacy, inexpressibility, invisibility, silence, and the exile of meaning. The most powerful expression for these writers comes not so much from writing (black words on white paper) as from the blank space between lines and around letters. Writing and erasing become synonymous. For a poet like the German Paul Celan words are like sand dunes, forever undoing the patterns of their meaning. For the French writer Edmond Jabes, writing covers the blank page the way wandering footprints trace themselves ephemerally onto the whiteness of the desert (that of Galut, exile). For Freud, language is the very medium of the "talking cure," but its connection to the unconscious remains oblique, imprecise, and deceptive. Discussion will be given to literary works by Kafka, Celan, Jabes, Aaron Appelfeld, Georges Perec, Natalia Ginzburg, Cynthia Ozick, W. G. Sebald, and to writings on the Holocaust by Primo Levi, Nelly Sachs, Bruno Schultz, and the Yiddish poet Avram Sutzkever. Theoretical texts by Freud, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Sarah Kofman, Emmanuel Levinas, Gershom Scholem, Maurice Blanchot, and others will be read as well. Format: lecture/discussion. Requirements: active participation in class discussions, oral presentations, one hour-exam, two 6-page papers. No prerequisites. Enrollment limit: 15 (expected: 15). This course is part of the Jewish Studies concentration. (Literature and Theory)