War and Cultural Representation in the Modern Middle East

This is an overview of contemporary Arabic and Persian literatures and cinemas through war in literature and film originating from the Eastern Arab World, Iran and Afghanistan. Using contemporary works of prose fiction, poetry and film, we interrogate the various ways in which the people of the region have grappled, through literature and film, with some of the most brutal conflicts that the world has witnessed in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. We will explore the Lebanese Civil War, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Iran-Iraq War, Iraq since 1991, Afghanistan since 1979 and the current Syrian Civil War. While this course is open all students it is especially geared towards students concentrating in MES and who have upper-level reading/ translations ability in Persian or Arabic. Students at the advanced language level will do translation in lieu of a second paper.