Francoise Meltzer
Office: Harper East 688
Email: mltz@midway.uchicago.edu
Professor of Religion and Literature and of the Philosophy of Religion in the Divinity School; also the Mabel Greene Myers Professor of the Humanities in French and in Comparative Literature, and the College
Education:
M.A. and PhD in Comparative Literature, University of California, Berkeley, 1975
Universitäts Freiburg in Breisgau, 1967-9
Visiting professor at Berkeley and at Cornell Universities.
Co-editor of Critical Inquiry since 1982.
Fellow at the Franke Institute, 2002-3.
Background:
My Ph.D. is in comparative literature. When I first came here I was mainly in 19th century French, German, and English literatures; in that order. I am in the department of comparative literature, which I chaired for about 7 years. In comparative literature I do a lot of critical theory, which I also do occasionally in Romance languages. I am very obsessed with critical theory. In fact, it is critical theory that got me into the Divinity School. They asked me to join the Religion and Lit section because of the work I was doing on Gender Theory. Then I moved on from there to the Philosophy of Religions. So those are my three academic affiliations. This year I am also directing the Franke Institute for the Humanities.
How did you become involved in the Committee:
For several reasons I suppose. One: because Menachem Brinker, whose work I know and admire, frequently tells students to come to me for Theoretical issues. I have a student now who is working on a dissertation with Brinker. She came to me for reading certain texts of critical theory, so that she could apply them in her dissertation. Working with such students is quite common for me, and I have been lucky to have terrific ones. I have also been involved for a long time in trying to fill the position for Modern Hebrew literature. As such, I have gotten to know a lot about Israeli scholars and the field. Also my thesis director was Robert Alter at Berkeley who had initially been interested in, actually has his Ph.D. in, 18th century English literature. But by the time I got there he was working on Jewish and Hebrew literature. So even though that was in no way my field, because of him I was in contact with a lot of Israeli scholars. That lead to a network of friends that I now have. Plus my best friend in grad school is Israeli and she suggested to me that I learn Hebrew, since I was boringly Western. I did French, English, German and Latin. How Western can you get? And so doing something different was really fascinating to me. I have been studying Hebrew off and on for a long time. My Hebrew's not great, to put it mildly. I've been working a bit with Ariela Finklestein.
I think as a result of these connections; like Benjamin Hashev at Yale, Menachem Brinker here, Robert Alter at Berkeley, and people who work in Israeli literature and Jewish studies here, I have gotten students who are working in Hebrew or in Jewish Studies.
What are your feelings on the Committee:
Comparative literature here was for many years a committee and not a department. It never prevented us from producing good Ph.D.'s who got good jobs. And Chicago has a long tradition of a very unique Committee system. So I don't really think it matters on the one hand whether it is a committee or a department, but Jewish studies, like comparative literature, are comprised of people who are all doing different things. I mean if you go into a department of French literature for example, everybody has to take Medieval French --there is a real sort of core that doesn't exist in Jewish Studies or comparative literature since everyone is doing something unique with different configurations. Not everyone knows about Chicago and its committee structure. So in that sense it might be a good idea for Jewish Studies to become a department. There is an internal disagreement, in a sense, about quote/unquote Jewish Studies. Many scholars of Modern Hebrew feel that it shouldn't be tied to ethnic identity, but rather that Israeli literature should be seen as one literature among literatures. Benjamin Hashev feels very strongly that way and so do many other people that I know. So it is not clear to me where I situate myself in that debate. I mean I certainly believe that Hebrew Literature should be understood as one among others. But what Jewish Studies means exactly, seems to me a bit vague. And I think it depends on who the faculty is, how they understand their mission, what kind of students they get. Whether they want to do a kind of broad ethnic course of studies, or whether it includes certain kinds of study is fairly aleatoric I think. In other words it seems to me more culture, which is fine, than a formal program in Modern Hebrew Literature.
What type of student would benefit working with you:
It would depend on the subject. I mean if it were about the intricacies of the Jewish Religion, I certainly wouldn't accept because I don't know much about it. I think my work in Gender makes me open to any minoritized groups, whether it be Queer Theory, Gender Theory, ethnic minorities. In other words a minority discourse and the way it understands itself inside a certain context of course. I have had quite a few students from Jewish Studies already, as I've said.
What advice would you give a student interested in your field:
I rarely get students until they are pretty far along, because I can't do the nuts and bolts of the Jewish Studies Department. What I can do is comparative forms of critical theory, which includes minority discourse literature. There I have been known, I hope, to be useful. Because I am in comparative literature I have a bias about working as much as possible in the original language. So if someone is going to do a dissertation on Hebrew Literature and reads only in translation, I would probably have trouble with that, at least at the graduate level. Undergraduate level is a different business.
What courses are you currently teaching:
I am not teaching courses right now because I am running the Franke Institute for the Humanities. Next quarter I am going to do an undergraduate comparative literature course on European Romanticism. But in the Spring I am going to teach a graduate seminar on subjectivity and gender. I want to look at how subjectivity is understood in a specific gendered way. But you can see how this would apply to "the Jew" as other or any other number of minoritized groups. I think that is one of the more interesting questions that come about in the Israeli context. For instance, I have a friend there who is an expert on Catholic Saints. And I said to him, "Why as an Israeli are you an expert on Catholic Saints?" And he says, "Well, because in the Israeli context, Catholic saints are very exotic." So there the Israeli discourse is of course the dominant one, but in the rest of the world that is obviously not the case. So I want to distinguish between contexts, to the extent that I can, to think about how context determines minority, otherness, the margin. The political situation in Israel certainly brings notions of alterity—in every direction—to the fore. As such, it is both a tragic and important site for understanding otherness.
What are you currently working on:
I am always working on something, although I am not getting much done right now because of my administrative duties.
Actually I am looking forward to next year when I will be on leave to finish two books. One is on the Revolution of 1848 in France and the other on the gendering of subjectivity.