This course offers an introduction to contemporary Arabic literature focusing on developments after the seismic period of regional transition within North Africa and the Middle East known as the “Arab spring.” Course readings will include critical essays and literary texts that reflect the forms of cultural reckoning that anticipated and followed the popular uprisings of the period, drawing principally from literary figures across Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Syria, and Tunisia. Themes explored through the course include questions of political change and anti-authoritarian writing; literary innovations across new media landscapes and censorship regimes; revisionist historical fiction in the wake of major political transitions; and intergenerational influences on rising authors. Texts will be taught in English translation and films screened with English subtitles.

This course will introduce students to writing by major pioneers of twentieth century Arabic literature and to cultural histories of the Middle East through the reading of literary texts. Readings drawn from a diversity of national contexts will include historical novels, short stories, experimental prose narratives, and selections from among the most influential poets of the twentieth century. Against the backdrop of Ottoman and Western European imperial domination within West Asia and North Africa, students in this class will explore how the development of modern Arabic literature has been variously understood by writers and critics: as a response to classical literary influences, as a force for political change, as a form of decolonial engagement, and as a source of cultural and linguistic cohesion after the dissolution of the Ottoman empire in the early twentieth century. Although readings will be consulted and discussed in English translation, Arabic or bilingual versions will be made available to those interested, and an attention to the politics of language will be considered through secondary readings on the controversial difference between regional dialects and transregional standards of literary Arabic.

Explores the reception of Greek culture in Nazi Germany and the cultural, historical, and political implications of the occupation of Greece by the Nazis. Emphasis will be also placed on holocaust memoirs by Greek Jews.