Middle Eastern Studies

An introduction to the Arabic language. The course takes a comprehensive approach to language learning and emphasizes the four skills of listening, speaking, reading, and writing. Students are introduced to the principles of grammar, taught how to read and write in the Arabic alphabet, and trained in the basics of everyday conversation. Through the use of a variety of written, video, and audio materials, as well as other resources made available through the Web, the course emphasizes authentic materials and stresses the active participation of students in the learning process.

Love in its myriad manifestations constitutes a central and perennial theme in the literary and artistic repertoires of Arabic- and Persian-speaking societies. This course explores the varied, subtle vocabulary and the versatile, multivalent imagery linked with the themes of love and longing in Arabic- and Persian-language literature and film. In different times and places, how have men and women writers and directors used the themes of love and longing to depict and critique concepts of gender and gender relations, and social and political inequalities? How have men and women writers and filmmakers in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries both continued and disrupted earlier literary and poetic discourses of love? How have modern filmmakers engaged with and reworked classical stories of transgressive love? Divided roughly equally between literary and cinematic works, the course explores treatments of love and longing in, for example, early Arabic poetry and the Quranic text, philosophical and medical treatises, narrative cycles (for example the Thousand and One Nights), epic (notably the Persian Shahnameh or ‘Book of Kings’), lyric poetry (Rumi, Saadi, Hafez), modern verse, and film, including films by Dariush Mehrjui, Youssef Chahine, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Abbas Kiarostami, Rakhshan Bani-Etamad and Shirin Neshat. (MES 271 and REL 271 are cross-listed courses.)