Harriet Murav - 'Modernism and Memory: The Strange New World of David Bergelson'

Author and educator Harriet Murav will discuss the first Yiddish modernist novel, David Bergelson's THE END OF EVERYTHING (1913), in the broad context of modernism's obsession with belatedness, and argue that Bergelson's work engages in a modernist fracturing of time even though it is set in the apparently provincial backwater of the shtetl. Harriet Murav is professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and of Comparative Literature at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the editor of Slavic Review, the author most recently of David Bergelson's Strange New World (2019), and a Joyce Z. and Jacob Greenberg Visiting Professor of Jewish Studies this quarter at the University of Chicago. A reception will follow.