Department of Germanic Languages & Literatures University of Toronto
You are warmly invited to an academic presentation by Miriam Schwartz, PhD candidate in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures and the collaborative program with the Anne Tanenbaum Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto.
Lecture Title:
Dubbed Jewish Literature: Orality, Multilingualism, and Translation in Twentieth-Century Hebrew and Yiddish Writing
Date: Thursday, April 3, 2025
Time: 4:00 PM
Location: Department Library, Room 323, 3rd Floor, Odette Hall
About the Lecture:
In Mirian’s dissertation, she examines orality and speech in twentieth-century Hebrew and Yiddish literature. During the early decades of the twentieth century, both Yiddish and Hebrew were transnational languages. This diasporic state of writing produced a multilingual literature, that is written in a seemingly monolingual fashion. Yet beneath this façade, modern Jewish literature frequently suppresses or obscures other languages – languages that do not appear in the text yet reveal themselves in various ways.
By exploring the noticeable gap between the language on page and the language of the story world, Schwartz aims to uncover the underlying lingual tensions, ideological affiliations, identity, and gender politics of the text. This gap becomes especially pronounced when the marked and unmarked languages within a text do not “speak” in the same tongue. The dissertation offers a comparative reading of Jewish literature across lingual, temporal, and spatial boundaries, demonstrating how different authors employ diverse strategies to depict the coexistence of multiple languages within a single narrative. Through this analysis, she highlights the variety of translingual practices that were available to Jewish authors in the creation of dubbed Jewish literature, and shows how ideology is translated into the representation of speech in these texts.
About the Speaker:
Miriam Schwartz is a PhD candidate in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures and the collaborative program with the Anne Tanenbaum Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto. Her research explores the representation of speech in Jewish literature written in Yiddish and Hebrew during the first half of the twentieth century. She focuses on issues of translation, orality, and ideology. Prior to joining the University of Toronto, Miriam earned her BA in Literature and MA in Yiddish Literature at Tel Aviv University.
We look forward to welcoming you to this engaging academic talk!
