Department of Literature (English), University of California, San Diego (Spring 2008)
Course Description:
As a grand narrative of radical transformation, the Biblical story of Moses and the Exodus of the Israelites from Egyptian slavery has been used to model political, theological and social change. Yet it has also been used to cement particular racial, religious and national identities and to establish a sense of continuity with the past. Particularly in the last three centuries, a number of literary authors, composers, film-makers and political leaders have turned to Exodus as a source of inspiration. This seminar will use the Exodus-narratives as a point of departure to explore the tensions between spiritual redemption and earthly political action, between universalist liberation movements and particular ethnic-religious interventions, between utopian dreams of the future and visionary appropriations of particular pasts.
We will begin with the Hebrew Bible’s portrayal of Moses as the tongue-tied leader of the Jewish people, and briefly consider debates about reading, re-reading and re-writing the Biblical stories as literature. We will discuss Enlightenment literature that imagines Moses as an Egyptian, and move on to look at nineteenth century literature on Moses as the liberator of African-Americans and finally, twentieth century works which re-write Moses as a complicated figure of modernity and modernism. How have various individuals and groups called upon this singular figure to define themselves even as they are well aware that he does not “belong” to any one nation or ethnicity? How can we understand Moses’ multiple identities as part of a single narrative phenomenon?