This course examines the nexus between war and literature through a multifaceted approach: by reading texts from a variety of genres and regions in the Arab world, students will be exposed to the diverse experiences and perspectives that helped shape the creative process of writing during times of high conflict and crisis. This course includes a comparative component that explores the interconnections between Arabic wartime fiction and several major historical events such as the Holocaust, the Argentinian Dirty War and some theoretical questions they raise. Do they each have their own unique structure and idiom, or can we think about individual and collective trauma through a translocal, cosmopolitan literary lens? Topics include: the individual and collective nature of trauma; the study of embodied practices such as testimony and witnessing; their uses in literature; the social role of sites of memory; performances of protest and resistance.
While this course takes a global approach to the study of literature produced during and about wartime experiences, it does so through site-specific ‘case-studies’ of fiction emanating from the Arab world and in Arabic (translated into English) thereby offering an in-depth account of select regional concentrations. Emphasis will be placed on contemporary Arabic novels and memoirs produced in the 21st century. The course asks the following questions: How do writers and artists engage and/or create narratives in times of war? How does fiction recreate, revise and re-examine the past during times of crisis? How do our human memories and imaginations give rise to the stories we tell in the aftermath of a traumatic event? In this course we consider the nature of writing and its relationship to war, both in the evolving life of the writer and in the development of the larger group or culture. This course will address these questions by tracing the interconnections between war and literature through close readings of memoirs, novels, poems, short stories, films, nonfictional critique, graphic art and sites of memory.