Gallatin School of Individualized Study, New York University (Fall 2008)
Course Description:
This course will consider the multiple identities of Moses from a broad range of historical, religious and cultural perspectives. Particular attention will be on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries when Moses emerged as a figure of modernity, hovering between history and memory, between cultural purity and hybridity, and between linguistic expression and its limits. We will begin with the Hebrew Bible and debates about reading, re-reading and re-writing the Bible as literature. We will then explore the figures of Moses as an Egyptian, as a perfectionist, as an artist, as a political leader, as the liberator of enslaved peoples, and as a complicated figure of modernism and post-modernism. For the final assignments, students are encouraged to create their own Moseses for the twenty-first century.