A Thousand and One Nights

Catalog description

This course focuses on questions of religious and cultural difference through the 1001 Nights, the corpus of tales that has served as a point of encounter between Middle Eastern literary traditions and the politics of Western culture, including ''Sinbad, ''Aladdin'' and ''Ali Baba''. Jewish, Christian, Zoroastrian, Muslim and 'pagan' realms co-exist uneasily in the original cycle of tales that often confront protagonists with such differences as a problem. Cultural difference piqued the interest of the Arab storytellers and European translators who brought the Nights to Europe and pioneered travelogues respectively of Europe and the Middle East. Their writings would serve as points of departure for seminal works on the engagement with cultural difference and its representation, Appiah's Cosmopolitanism and Said's Orientalism.