Fall 2008
Instructor: Haytham Bahoora
V29.0190.003
Topics in 20th
Century Literature: Modernity & Identity in the Arabic Novel
This
course will examine the intersections of history, politics, and identity and
their representations in modern Arabic literature and film. How have Arab
writers depicted the social, political and cultural upheavals that have shaped
the Arab world in the 20th century? We will consider some of these
changes-- the end of the colonial period, the rise of the nation state and Arab
nationalism, narratives of progress and development, debates on tradition and
their place in a “modern” society, gender, Islam, and globalization—in the
context of the Arab world’s economic, cultural, and military interactions with
Europe and the United States. The course, therefore, aims to examine Arabic
literature and culture in a global context and will explore a range of texts,
from novels, to theory, to films, that address the relationship between
identity and modernity, and between the particular/local and what is
represented as universal—development, progress, modernization, and liberalism.
We will closely examine the relationship between politics
and aesthetics, primarily through an examination of the novel genre in the
Arabic tradition and its relationship to historical representation.