Comparative Arab/ic Literature and Criticism

Catalog description

This course provides students with a comprehensive overview of modern Arab/ic literature, in dialogue with critical approaches that illuminate these texts within a comparative framework. By examining the critical interventions and debates that have shaped Arabic literature up until our present moment, this course invites students to attend to the manifold ways that this literature engages the major theoretical paradigms of global literary studies. It subsequently de-provincializes these debates beyond the limited purview of ethno-linguistic, philological, or geopolitical divisions of the field. It instead situates this literature as an active agent within world literary debates and criticism, both past and present. In this regard, the course will invite students to critically reframe the (neo)colonial or (neo)orientalist categories of the `Middle East' and `Near East,' and to consider other supra- and transnational exchanges staged across Asia, Africa, and the Mediterranean, as well as in the diaspora. In so doing, the course aims to look beyond the exclusive lens of the (post)colonial, or binary models of center/periphery, that dominate discussions of `third-world' literature. In moving away from the siloing of these traditions within Area Studies, the course considers the repercussions of these debates for narrative, aesthetic, geopolitical, theoretical, and pedagogical concerns across the study of Comparative Literature. Students will read a wide variety of literary texts in English translation, spanning a range of genres (prose, poetry, drama, film). Alongside these works, they will engage with critical and philosophical writings from the Arab/ic context, on topics such as aesthetics and the sublime, affects and embodiment, futurity and dystopia, ecocriticism and the Anthropocene, language, modernity/postmodernism, globalization, trauma, and more. After having taken this class, students will have gained a sound grasp of the field, as well as its literary and historical dimensions. They will also have developed a critical understanding of the current challenges and directions of the study of modern Arab/ic literature.