This module is not currently running in 2024 to 2025.
The module introduces students to one of the richest and most stimulating eras of Arabic literary innovation and aims to link literary processes of transformation to current political changes. Exploring how recent Arabic fiction prefigures the 2011 Arab Spring revolution, the module offers students the opportunity to study these works in English translation by analysing creative trends and movements that currently resonate around the region. In addition, the module explores how these emerging Arab voices negotiate links to the past in relation to texts such as The Thousand and One Nights. The module combines the methodological approaches of comparative literature, the sociology of literature and postcolonial theory and explores concepts such as cultural identity, gender, diaspora and historiography.
2 hours per week
100% coursework
Indicative Reading List -
1. Naguib Mahfuz, Palace Walk: The Cairo Trilogy vol.1 (New York: Anchor Books, 1991).
2. Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North (London: Penguin Classics, 2003).
3. Ghassan Kanafani, Men in the Sun and Other Palestinian Stories (s.p.: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1998).
4. Hanan al-Shaykh, Women of Sand and Myrrh (London: Bloomsbury, 2010).
5. Deborah Akers and Abubaker A. Bagader (eds), Oranges in the Sun: Contemporary Short Stories from the Arabian Gulf (s.p.: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2006).
6. Alaa Al Aswany, The Yacoubian Building (London: Harper Perennial, 2007).
See the library reading list for this module (Canterbury)
On successful completion of the module students will be able to:
1. Demonstrate a comprehensive understanding of the various stages of development of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Arabic literature.
2. Show detailed understanding of the most significant literary movements in the Arabic literature of the Middle East.
3. Display a critical understanding of the ways in which Arabic literature has been shaped by its interaction with the West.
4. Understand the complex interplay between political developments and literary trends and movements.
5. Demonstrate a critical understanding of relevant postcolonial theories and how these can be used to enhance our analyses of literary representations.
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