Conflict In Cult & Lit

Catalog description

This course will focus on the literary and cultural response to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict since the beginning of the Zionist settlement to our time. We will ask questions such as how each culture, the Israeli and Palestinian, has represented the other? Has each depiction been a unified cultural portraiture or can we identify multifarious delineations? What constitutes national identity and what role have national, religious, racial and gender perspectives played in the construction of the Israeli and Palestinian identities? How has the various formation of the other contributed to the identity creation of each culture? And finally, can we point out significant historical changes in these representations? We will examination of both Palestinian and Israeli experiences as reflected in various texts including fiction, poetry, philosophical and historical treatises, editorials, caricatures, film and the like, all in English translation. Last but not least, we will try to understand both the stable and the changing parameters of national identity on the background of universal intellectual and political movements such as nationalism, multiculturalism, and globalization.