Literary Garbage: Hebrew Literature, Waste, and the Climate Crisis

Join us for a lecture, reading, and discussion session, with Dr. Tafat Hacohen-Bick in which we will explore what an ecocritical reading in the Hebrew Literary corpus can teach us about how to live with waste in times of a very tangible climate crisis. Food will be provided.

Dr. Tafat Hacohen Bick, was a post-doctoral fellow at the Katz Center (2022-2023). She holds a PhD from Ben Gurion University, where she wrote a dissertation on the poetry of Pinchas Sadeh, Yona Wallach, and Zelda Schneerson. Now, she serves as a visiting scholar at NYU and CUNY and teaches courses on secularization and religion in Hebrew Literature. 

In her talk, she will present her current research, in which she explores representations of garbage and waste in Hebrew Literature, and discusses an aesthetic shift from a Modern discourse of "cleanliness" to a later discourse that, through an aesthetic engagement with garbage, wishes to adopt a perspective that sees waste and garbage as fundamental and inherent to nature.

Theorizing is the graduate-student-organized colloquium series in Comparative Literature.  Scholars are invited to give talks focused on exciting new areas of literary and critical theory, transnational literary studies and translation studies.