Advanced Topics in Middle East & North African Studies (390-6-3)

Topic

The Absent Other: Letter Writing in Arabic and Wor

Instructors

Xena Amro

Meeting Info

Kresge Centennial Hall 2-440: Tues, Thurs 11:00AM - 12:20PM

Overview of class

The Absent Other: Letter Writing in Arabic and World Literature

What does it mean to write a letter that may never reach its destination? Franz Kafka once described letter writing as an "intercourse with ghosts"—an encounter not only with the spirit of the addressee but also with the spectral self. This course explores the epistolary imagination across Arabic, European, and global literatures, asking why letters have so often become privileged forms for love, exile, confession, seduction, philosophical inquiry, and political critique. We will read a combination of real-life correspondence, fictional letters, novels, and literary theory. Across these texts, we will consider how the epistolary form produces intimacy precisely through delay and distance, while unsettling boundaries between public and private, fiction and archive, from the medieval Islamicate world to modern and contemporary writing.

Readings include selections from Ibn Hazm's The Ring of the Dove, the Epistles of the Brethren of Purity, Montesquieu's Persian Letters, Jacques Derrida's The Post Card, the correspondence of Khalil Gibran and May Ziadeh, Franz Kafka's Letters to Milena, selected letters of James Joyce, and Hoda Barakat's Voices of the Lost, alongside film and illustrated correspondence. All texts will be read in English translation. Through these texts, students will examine how writers across centuries and traditions have used letters to think through desire, memory, selfhood, and belonging under conditions of distance and displacement.

Class Attributes

Literature and Arts Foundational Discipline