At Boston University I teach courses of my own design on Arabic literature, world literature, and literary translation. I also enjoy teaching other courses, including the Core Curriculum social science course “The Unmaking of the Modern World.” I founded BU’s interdisciplinary major in Middle East and North Africa Studies in 2014 and am the advisor for the Arabic minor.
Arabic Literature
War in Arabic Literature and Film (in English). What does it mean to make art out of carnage? Can killing coexist with style? Do different genres (fiction film, documentary, memoir, novel, animated film, comics, theatre) inspire different approaches to the experience of war? How does an artistic portrayal of a war differ from a journalistic one? This course samples the literature and film of several wars that have roiled and shaped the Middle East region. We will consider works by Iraqi, Syrian, Lebanese, and Palestinian artists of various backgrounds and genders: memoirs, poems, novels, plays, and genre-bending experimental texts. Works by Israelis and Americans provide counterpoints. Readings, discussions, and assignments are in English.
Introduction to Arabic Literature (bilingual format, 50% each in Arabic and English). The course is a bilingual hybrid. To let students read literary works in full and discuss them at the most sophisticated level of which they are capable, most Tuesday readings and discussions are in English. To build Arabic language and close reading skills and to focus more concretely on Arabic literary styles, Thursday readings, presentations, and discussions are in Arabic and look closely at short passages from the same texts. Reading most texts in two versions, we attend explicitly to translation choices large and small, and to the way texts change as they are moved across languages and cultural contexts. Three years of Arabic or equivalent proficiency are recommended.
Arabic Translation and Interpreting (grad/undergrad). This course provides an in-depth grounding in Arabic-to-English written translation: its mechanics, its poetics, its ethics, and its politics. The course also introduces students to the challenging field of Arabic-English interpreting in order to build their awareness of people as products of communities, their transcultural empathy, and their communicative and presentational speaking skills in Arabic and English. The course is conducted in both Arabic and English. Native speakers of Arabic, whatever their level of proficiency in English, are welcome.
World Literature (back to top)
Global Shakespeares: Text, Culture, Adaptation. Why do contemporary artists feel a recurring need to parrot and parody “Shakespeare,” and how much of this activity is about Shakespeare at all? This seminar provides a solid college-level introduction to reading and writing about Shakespeare’s plays. But it also serves as a window into a larger discussion about culture-shaping texts and text-shaping cultures. We examine dramatic texts, films, and videos of theatre productions (including those available online through MIT’s Global Shakespeares Electronic Archive). We discuss dissident, postcolonial, and feminist interpretations of Shakespeare as well as commercial adaptations. We also read four “original” Shakespeare plays to which the rewriters respond. We go to the theatre, interview guest speakers, and engage with actual artists’ creative process. Beyond learning about particular adaptations, the deeper point is to make sure students never read a “Great Book” the same way again.
1001 Nights in the World Literary Imagination (grad/undergrad). A Thousand and One Nights has been a seminal text for world literature. What can the Nights teach us about the many oppositions (oral/written, folk/scholarly, prose/poetry, secular/religious, mundane/fantastic) that it bridges? How have so many readers and writers found their way into this medieval Arabic cultural grab-bag? From the Nights‘ original Muslim context to more recent Arabic adaptations, and from early European translations and imitations to modern frame stories and fantasy literature, this course explores the magic of the Nights and the deep, sometimes dark artistic appetites they have both fed and fostered.
Leaving Home: Explorations in World Literature. Growing up. Wisdom quest. Migration. Sightseeing. Escape. The memory of leaving home defines many of the most memorable characters of world literature, from the Bible’s Abraham and Plato’s Philosopher, to Sindbad the Sailor, and Genji, all the way to modern protagonists created amid colonization, mass migration, and rapid social change. This course explores how the world’s great literatures have portrayed and shaped the experience of leaving home. We read scripture, epic, fiction, and poetry from four continents, examining characters and writers who left (and some who stayed). Designed as a gateway to World Languages and Literatures majors, this course provides a solid college-level introduction to literature.
Intro to Western Literatures: Does Reading Make You a Better Person? What are the dangers and transformative possibilities of reading? European literature, more than any of the world’s other major literary traditions, has been dogged and even constituted by this problem. This course dives into some brilliant works by Spanish, English, German, Russian, French, Irish, Italian, and American writers. We focus on protagonists who love to read and who struggle to liberate themselves from the narratives imposed by social pressure and even by their authors. Do these characters succeed in becoming the authors of their own lives – or do they succumb to the tyranny of genre, living out narratives not of their own choosing? And do their own favorite artworks help these characters become more human – or just ensnare them further? Their travails help us to notice the narratives that govern our own lives and to ask honestly whether a deep engagement with literature has any role in making us more decent, kinder, happier, or more free.
Intro to Comparative Literature: Middle Eastern Literature. A region always predefined by outsiders (“middle” of what? “east” of what?), the Middle East is not the product of a single group or culture. Our texts differ from each other in many ways: they span 3500 years, five languages, and diverse genres of poetry and prose literature. They stretch our understanding of what literature can be, and of what the category of “literature” has meant to people in different cultures and times. What unites these disparate texts is precisely the idea of difference – each new text’s struggle to join or overturn an existing literary tradition, to replace inherited cultural assumptions with new ones. The sometimes violent play of opposites – oral and written, sacred and secular, “traditional” and imported – opens the spaces in which writers and readers work to fashion themselves as creative human beings.
Russia in the Middle East: Literary Encounters. The roots of today’s Russian involvement in the Middle East reach deep into the nineteenth century. This course explores that fraught history through the lenses of fiction and literary nonfiction, journalistic and scholarly accounts, raw propaganda, and films. It asks: How have Russian readers and writers imagined the Muslim world? How have readers and writers in the Arab world imagined Russia and the Soviet Union? What has happened when these respective fantasies have collided during real-life encounters such as diplomatic missions, study abroad, exile, or war?
Literary Translation (grad/undergrad) (back to top)
History and Theory of Literary Translation. Part of the MFA in Literary Translation. This course familiarizes students with the history of translation and the main trends in Translation Studies. Students apply concepts acquired in class to analyze and critique translations and develop their own strategies.
Translation Today. Part of the MFA in Literary Translation. Weekly lectures and discussions with prominent literary translators into English. Students engage with a variety of languages and several genres: poetry, drama, essay, fiction, and more. Focus on close reading of the speakers’ work and concrete, practical translation issues arising from it.
Topics in Literary Translation: 1001 Nights as a Translators’ Playground. This seminar explores how a “badly written” premodern Arabic story collection grew into one of the most often and passionately retranslated landmarks of the Euro-American literary tradition. Students explore several competing Nights versions (Galland, Lane, Burton, Haddawy, Lyons, Mardrus, Seale); enact a Translators’ Debate; read Nights-inspired texts by 20th-century and contemporary world authors; watch films by Walsh, Korda, and others; listen to music, look at art, and more. No knowledge of Arabic required.
Literary Translation Seminar: Practice and Theory of Literary Translation, 2013 & 2014. Originated by Rosanna Warren, this course has expanded to become the BU MFA in Literary Translation. Read my essay about it here.
Other topics (back to top)
Second-semester freshman humanities core (Aristotle to Dante). Part of the BU Core Curriculum. Course page here.
Unmaking the Modern World: The Psychology, Politics, and Economics of the Self.Part of the BU Core Curriculum in social sciences. Course page here.
Religion and the Secular. Second-semester sophomore social science core, 2018.
ME 101 Issues in Middle East & North Africa Studies. One-credit mini-seminar for the Middle East & North Africa Studies major.
Margaret Litvin 