Dr. Dani Schrire (Hebrew University) to lecture in Tartu

Department of Estonian and Comparative Folklore is happy to host Dr. Dani Schrire from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He received his PhD in the program for folklore and folk-culture from the Hebrew University (2012), carrying out his doctoral and post-doctoral research at the Hebrew University, the Institute for European Ethnology at Humboldt University Berlin, the Institute for Cultural Anthropology / European Ethnology at Göttingen University, and at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Collecting the Pieces of the Diaspora: Zionist Folkloristics Facing the Shoah (forthcoming in Magnes Press). His current research focuses on the development of Jewish folkloristics in international networks in Europe, Palestine/Israel and the United States between 1840 and 1970.

Dr. Schrire will deliver three lectures in Tartu, all of which are open to the public:

The lecture on Wednesday, March 7 at 12:15-13:45 is titled “Heritage, Tradition and Nostalgia: Actualizing a Lost Past after the Shoah in Zionist Folkloristics (1942-1970)” (Ülikooli 16-215) and examines how folklorists cope with loss, taking as its starting point three theoretical as well as practical lenses: heritage, tradition, nostalgia. The lecture demonstrates the contradiction between these three terms and the ways in which folklorists negotiated immense discontinuity of folk-life, also touching upon current discussions on heritage and key issues in folkloristics (e.g. the assumption of continuity in folklore).

The lecture on Wednesday, March 14 at 16:15-17:45 titled “Walter Anderson's Pioneering Work in Yiddish Folkloristics and the Boundaries of Folklore” (Ülikooli 16-109) focuses on the first professor of Folkloristics at the University of Tartu.

Video recording of the lecture is available at the UTTV video server.

On Thursday, March 15 at 12:15-13:45 there is going to be a lecture titled “Poetic Emancipation: Adapting Ancient Jewish Texts to Modern European Generic Systems” (Ülikooli 16-214), which introduces the complexity of applying genres to Jewish written and oral literature, focusing on written texts rather than performed oral literature. The talk will follow the ways in which scholars of the Wissenschaft des Judenthums, operating within the German reading sphere, re-read Jewish ancient literature through the generic taxonomy that was formulated by the Grimm brothers. Three episodes will be given close scrutiny: Moritz Steinschneider and his formulation of Sage/Legende, Ignaz Goldziher's studies of the Bible as Myth and Bernhard Heller's contribution to the Bolte and Polivka comparative remarks on the Grimms (Märchen). The lecture will discuss the success - and failure - of applying such German analytic categories to ancient Jewish written texts in the context of the changing relations between Germans and Jews over a long time-span (1840-1990). 

Additional information: Elo-Hanna Seljamaa (elo-hanna.seljamaa@ut.ee), Department of Estonian and Comparative Folklore.