Literary Encounters and Reading across the Wor(l)ds

Catalog description

The focus of this seminar will be exploring the conception of encounters, and contact zones, throughout a selection of Arabic literary works. The course will explore the history of translation in Arabic literary history, the introduction of prose and its development; the Arabic readerly culture; the colonial encounter and its effect on language and form of literature. We will not read encounter as one-way traffc only, but we will also read it as a two-way process. We will read non-Arabic works that were influenced by the texts we are reading and their literary reception in other literary traditions. We will also consider the institution of literary prizes as a form of encounter and analyze the power of celebrity culture on the readership of the contemporary Arabic novel