AMES1836

This course introduces students to the diversity of contemporary Middle Eastern cultures, identities, and histories through readings in modern literature. Reading novels, stories, poetry, and memoirs translated from Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, and Turkish, we will follow a number of key concerns shaping Middle Eastern cultural production: legacies of colonialism and the manner they shaped the relationship between classical and modern literary forms, the ethical and aesthetic challenges of bearing testimony to violence, and the manner literature reflects and subverts racial hierarchies, ethnic divisions, and gender dynamics. These themes will be debated in a range of spaces and contexts: the desert, the city, and the ocean as quintessential environments in times of great social and ecological upheavals; migration flows and refugee identities; the alternating banality and grotesqueness of war; and the formation of intimate, personal relationships.