Literature of the Great War in the Middle East

Catalog description

Some of the best-known literary texts of the previous century harken back to the Great War. And while works of fiction and non-fiction such as Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, and Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway have become twentieth-century classics; and the poetry of Brooke, Graves, Gurney, Owen, and Sassoon widely celebrated; the Middle East’s contribution to the literature of the Great War is little explored. This course takes us on a literary journey from the trenches of Gallipoli and Mesopotamia, to famine-struck towns of Mount Lebanon, to orphanages in Syria. We will examine poetry (including zajal—colloquial poetry), and memoirs and diaries by the women and men who withstood the ravages of war and helped shape the modern Middle East. Through close reading and content analysis of a diverse constellation of published and unpublished texts, and using secondary sources as guideposts, we will explore “post-Ottoman memoirs” and verse, including translations from the Arabic and Armenian by the instructor