Browse Hierarchy COM5215: Modern Arabic Literature in the World: Colonial Encounter to Climate Crisis

In this module, we ask how modern Arabic literature has been forged in the context of global cultural and political shifts. Challenging narratives about how European ideas and genres were 'imitated' in the Middle East, the course addresses themes of cultural cross-pollination, travelling texts, and the many meanings of the 'world' in world literature. The course opens with the nineteenth-century Arabic literary 'renaissance' and the violence of the colonial encounter, and moves through twentieth-century modernist and avant-garde Arabic fiction to contemporary Arabic sci-fi, in which writers work to re-imagine our global future.