The Arabian Nights

Catalog description

The Arabian Nights (more accurately known as The Thousand and One Nights) is a collection of stories that circulated in the medieval Islamic world and would later become a canonical classic of world literature thanks to various stages of addition, translation, and creative retelling. It is a heady agglomeration of tales written with a distinctive frame story and form about characters and deeds that have been considered in turn memorable, hilarious, disgusting, arousing, thrilling, repugnant, and inspirational by various audiences since its beginning—and possibly even before it ever existed. In this course, we will read almost the entirety of the 14th century collection of tales that constitute the earliest existing version of The Thousand and One Nights and analyze it both in relation to the medieval genres and historical contexts that shaped it and through contemporary theoretical frameworks. The Thousand and One Nights is a fluid and changing collection, so it is not our goal to focus on some clearly-defined “original”. We will instead discuss this collections’ origins, famous later additions such as the stories of Aladdin and Sindbad, and the role that its reception and translation in Europe played in making it a key text of world literature. We will also study some of its many later adaptations in film, poetry, and narrative. By analyzing key components of the text such as the frame story, fantasy, romance, and representations of race and gender, and by considering the aesthetics and politics of literary engagement with The Thousand and One Nights in modern contexts, we will come to appreciate the stories’ many travels across time and genres and develop our own ideas on what The Thousand and One Nights can teach us about the enduring power of storytelling. This course is taught in English, including all readings.