Modern Levantine and Arabic Literature (in translation)

This course explores the multicultural nature of the Levantine region of the Middle East by surveying the twentieth century literary and intellectual production of Arabic-speaking lands of the Eastern Mediterranean and Israel. Representative texts, authors, and mediums will be explored spanning poetry, short stories, novellas, and memoirs, examining questions of identity, culture, religion, nationalism, conflict, war, and minority narratives. Taught in English, the works that will be surveyed are culled from authors whose languages of intellectual production ranged from Arabic to French, Hebrew, Syriac, Turkish, English, and dialectal languages. Some of the authors we will explore, like Adonis or Mario Levi may be internationally renowned; others that we will discover are usually kept out of the traditional corpus of Arabic and Levantine literature.