Odysseys in the Western and Islamic Traditions

Fulfills Non-Western Requirement for History Majors. Bridging the traditional divide between "East" and "West," "Christendom" and "Islamdom" and viewing cultural production as rooted in the human experience, this course focuses upon similar literary and intellectual trajectories across Europe and the Middle East from antiquity to the late eighteenth century. We will examine a series of parallel texts that span the genres of epic, poetry, biography, autobiography and travel narrative. Students will be asked to read these texts in two ways: as an individual perspective (male or female) and as an odyssey--a literary repository of socio-cultural transformation and exchange.

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