Meïr Aaron Goldschmidt and the Danish Jewish Novel

Guest lecture by Gantt Gurley, Associate Professor of Scandinavian at the University of Oregon and Director, The Harold Schnitzer Family Program in Judaic Studies.

Gantt Gurley received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 2007. Before coming to University of Oregon he was a Harry Starr Fellow in Judaica at the Center for Jewish Studies at Harvard University.

His first book Meïr Aaron Goldschmidt and the Poetics of Jewish Fiction examines one of Denmark’s greatest nationalistic writers as first and foremost a Jewish artist, exploring his relationship to the Hebrew Bible and later Rabbinical traditions such as the Talmud and the Midrash as a form of poetics.

He is currently working on two future publications. The first is a joint project that is mapping the sudden appearance of Rabbinic tales in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century vernaculars in Northern Europe. The second is a study of the Wandering Jew legend in Long Romanticism, from Goethe and Schiller to Andersen and Hawthorne. A central aim of both projects and his research at large is to illuminate the mechanisms whereby Jewish thought is reawakened in the European consciousness. His research and teaching interests include ancient and medieval song culture, the birth of the novel, Romanticism, Old Icelandic literature, the lyrical mode, fairy tales and folklore, and notions of religiosity in the Danish Golden Age.