Névine El Nossery
3 credits, fulfills Literature requirement
Spring 2018
This course is a survey of the most significant topics of contemporary Arabic literature and cinema: Arabs and the West, colonialism and postcolonialism, Discourses on nationalism, religion v. secularization, gender relations, representation of cultural otherness, and the Arab Springs. The course offers you an opportunity to enhance your understanding of global culture by exploring a diverse array of culturally expressive artifacts—novels, short stories, poems, and films—produced by Arab and Muslim writers and directors from the Arab world. That said, I would be cautious about understanding this course as a comprehensive “survey” of Arabic literature and cinema: it is more accurately a “sampling.” And because these books and films, and their cultures are fairly unfamiliar, we will move slowly through them, taking time to reflect on our own process of reading.