Introduction to Comparative Literature

Gateway Course for work in the Comparative Literature Major.

The influence of The 1001 Nights on Western literature has been so widespread that, outside of the Bible, it has no rival from the literature of the Near in the world literary imagination. Jorge Luis Borges once said that the Nights, “is a book so vast that it is not necessary to have read it.” Yet, only by reading the original Arabic story collection of the Nights, taken from Indian and Persian sources, can we reach an understanding of how this story collection has come to play such a decisive role in both Arab and Western cultural spheres since the eighteenth century. This class will examine the core stories of the Nights based on Medieval Arabic manuscripts and the history of the Nights’ translation, reception, and large-scale appropriation by the West from the eighteenth century onward. We will look at the Nights’ narrative structure, often a source of innovation for later authors, while simultaneously examining how the stories have often served to reinforce colonial and neocolonial projects. We will likewise consider how the figure of the Nights’ famous storyteller, Shahrazad, has paradoxically been the subject of appropriation by both Western Orientalists and Arab feminists. We will work across different media and genres, with texts, images, theater, and film, to understand the Nights and its influence in the most far reaching sense. Texts will include the translation of Muhsin Mahdi’s edited fourteenth century Syrian manuscript, excerpts from Edward Lane’s and Richard Burton’s translations, and both Eastern and Western works fundamentally influenced by the Nights, among them: Edgar Allen Poe, Salman Rushdie, Jorge Luis Borges, Naguib Mahfouz, and Voltaire.