Syria in Literature and Film

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

How do art and literature shape our understanding of politics, identity, and belonging? This course examines cultural production in and about modern Syria through a range of genres and media, including novels, poetry, plays, short stories, films, and TV shows. The course will pivot around significant events in the history of modern Syria, such as the tumultuous era of post-independence, the defeat of 1967, the ascendancy of Hafez al-Asad to power, and the onset of the revolution and the subsequent civil war of 2011. We will consider how Syrian artists and writers negotiate structures of state censorship, hegemony, historical consciousness, national identity, community-making, and collective memory. We will explore how Syrian intellectuals have and continue to use aesthetic form as a means of critique, survival, and resistance. The texts and visual media we encounter in this course range from the intimate to the epic, the realist to the experimental, offering complex conceptions about systems of oppression and narratives of nationhood. To analyze the various Syrian cultural texts, we will adopt an interdisciplinary lens, drawing on political, literary, and film theories, media and cultural studies, and historical analysis in order to trace how narratives reflect and reshape the social and political contexts from which they emerge. We will read and view works by prominent Syrians, including Sadiq Jalal al-Azm, Adonis, Nihad Sirees, Samar Yazbek, Ghada al-Samman, Muhammad Malas, and Sa’dallah Wannous among others. This course will be taught in English and all texts will be read in translation.