| CODE | MDT3006 | ||||||
| TITLE | Literatures of North Africa and the Middle East: Contexts, Themes and Urgencies | ||||||
| UM LEVEL | 03 - Years 2, 3, 4 in Modular Undergraduate Course | ||||||
| MQF LEVEL | 6 | ||||||
| ECTS CREDITS | 4 | ||||||
| DEPARTMENT | Mediterranean Institute | ||||||
| DESCRIPTION | This study-unit takes students on a journey across the postcolonial literary map of North Africa and the Middle East (the MENA region), discussing and placing a range of literary texts in the context of some of the salient motifs of fictional and life writing in across the south-eastern Mediterranean littoral. The study-unit will open with two introductory sessions that set out the core issues, concerns and underlying political, aesthetic, cultural, social and humanitarian contexts that have characterised the fictional and autobiographical output from the region over the past decades. Lectures and classroom debate will focus on notions of refuge and journeying, memory and trauma in the Mediterranean, the literature of migration, return and crossing, the memoir form and the archive, post-migrant writing, melancholy and displacement, the Mediterranean city, self-narration, and other urgent issues and literary thematics. Each session on the study-unit will then focus upon, and trigger in-depth discussion of some of the texts and writers that have, through their work, both impacted the regional imaginary and responded to the urgencies that continue to (re)shape its diverse geographies, politics and social-communal fabrics. Authors discussed on the study-unit include Hisham Matar, Alaa al-Aswany, Orhan Pamuk, Wadad Makdisi Cortas, Laila Lalami, Sonallah Ibrahim, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Amin Maalouf, Möez Majed, Amos Oz, Stephanos Stephanides and other writers. Each discussion across the study-unit will place these authors and their output in the national, historical, economic and regional contexts of North Africa and the Middle East that gave rise to some of the main concerns emanating from their work. The final class on the study-unit will consist of a roundtable session that will bring together the students and lecturers in a debate on the shared and divergent concerns, affinities and different takes across the corpus of writing discussed in the course of the lectures. Study-Unit Aims: The aims of the study-unit are to familiarise local and international students with the current modes of memory and fiction writing in the South Mediterranean and MENA regions, with an emphasis on Anglophone memory- and fiction-writing as well as from a broader world-literary purview that includes other memoirs and novels by translated authors of international and major regional stature. The study-unit introduces students to the modern-day literary map of the Mediterranean region by placing literary texts in the context of some of the major aesthetic, humanitarian and political realities, challenges and prospects affecting the MENA and South Mediterranean regions and their communities today. Learning Outcomes: 1. Knowledge & Understanding: By the end of the study-unit the student will be able to: - Approach North Africa and Southern Mediterranean from an informed perspective based on some of the most authoritative critical and literary perspectives in the field. - Discuss issues such as migration, displacement, democratisation, as well as questions of refuge, political memory and asylum from an informed literary point of view. - Discuss the affinities between literature, aesthetics, politics and culture as these manifest in some of the major issues affecting communities and literary-cultural sectors in the region through cutting-edge Anglophone texts as well as texts in authoritative English translations. 2. Skills: By the end of the study-unit the student will be able to: - Offer informed perspectives on the issues and urgencies addressed in present-day literary output in the MENA, east and south Mediterranean zones of writerly activity. - Participate in pubic debates and scholarly fora and confidently engage in the major arguments fielded by some of the major writers active in the region today. - Acquire a sound knowledge of the humanitarian and political urgencies that spur the production of memory-writing and fiction the east and south Mediterranean. - By means of the literary text, grasp the implications and issues stemming from the post-colonial moment in former British and French colonial territories in North Africa and the Middle East. - Discuss the relationship between aesthetic representations and cultural-political manifestations of space, memory and culture in the Mediterranean. Main Text/s and any supplementary readings: Main Texts: - Alaa Al-Aswany, 'The Yacoubian Building' (Cairo: AUC Press, 2004). - Mourid Barghouti, 'I Saw Ramallah' (Anchor Books, 2003). - Tahar Ben Jelloun, 'A Palace in the Old Village' (London: Arcadia Books, 2011). - Tahar Ben Jelloun, 'Leaving Tangier' (London: Penguin Books, 2009). - Sonallah Ibrahim, 'Zaat' (Cairo: AUC Press, 2004). - Amin Maalouf, 'Origins -- A Memoir' (London: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux 2008). - Wadad Makdisi Cortas, 'A World I Loved' (PublicAffairs, 2009). - Hisham Matar, 'The Return -- Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between' (London: Penguin, 2016). - Amos Oz, 'A Tale of Love and Darkness' (San Diego, CA: Harcourt, 2004). - Orhan Pamuk, 'Istanbul -- Memories of a City' (London: Faber and Faber, 2011). - Stephanos Stephanides, 'The Wind Under my Lips' (Athens: To Rodakio 2019). Supplementary Readings: - Orhan Pamuk, 'The Museum of Innocence' (London: Faber and Faber, 2011). - Hisham Matar, 'A Month in Siena' (London: Penguin, 2019). - Assia Djebar, 'Fantasia -- An Algerian Cavalcade' (London: Heinemann, 1993). - Iain Chambers, 'Mediterranean Crossings (DUke University Press, 2008). |
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| STUDY-UNIT TYPE | Lecture | ||||||
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The University makes every effort to ensure that the published Courses Plans, Programmes of Study and Study-Unit information are complete and up-to-date at the time of publication. The University reserves the right to make changes in case errors are detected after publication.
The availability of optional units may be subject to timetabling constraints. Units not attracting a sufficient number of registrations may be withdrawn without notice. It should be noted that all the information in the description above applies to study-units available during the academic year 2023/4. It may be subject to change in subsequent years. |
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