ENGL 459Writing Palestine-Israel

3 credits · English · Penn State

Study of literary writing of and about the Israel-Palestine conflict. This course examines the Israel-Palestine conflict through an analysis of literature written by participants, victims, bystanders, and observers. We will read literature by Arabs, Jews, and Christian; by Israelis, Palestinians, and other populations affected by the conflict; and by writers in the Arab World, Europe, and the Americas in order to develop a nuanced understanding of the conflict, its history, what's at stake for its participants, antagonists, and victims. The course will emphasize close reading and aesthetic analysis, but it will also pay attention to the ways in which literature can be used to think about history, experience, and politics. The course will survey a wide array of writing from a diverse set of global traditions, including significant figures, themes, and histories, and the course will pay attention to literature's intersections with migration history, international politics, faith, nationalism, and revolutionary liberation. The course will showcase national and religious diversity. We will focus on the relationship of writing of and about the Israel-Palestine conflict to other subfields and literary study more generally, including issues such as ethnicity, culture, religion, diaspora, gender, politics, and identity. A major emphasis of the course will be on analyzing literary texts as lenses to reflect, refract, and focus on Arab, Jewish, and Palestinian identity. In addition, by way of analyzing the interrelationships between literary representation and experience, the course will attend to a number of key themes in how we think about Diaspora, with some special emphasis on American literature about the Israel-Palestine conflict: how have American writers, and especially American writers of Arab, Jewish, and Muslim heritage, articulated their identities in relation to the Israel-Palestine conflict and the Middle East more generally, including the long history of US involvement in the Middle East? The course will cover both English-language literature and literature in translation from other languages.