MES 16.40 Mediterranean Poetics
Focusing largely on what in the West has traditionally been called the Middle Ages, this course will engage with a series of cultural artifacts produced throughout the Mediterranean basin beginning in Roman antiquity, and extending into Muslim Spain, Occitania, northern France, Italy, and the contemporary Arab world. ‘Poetics’ – as both a practice of and a conceptual framework for the imagination – will here encompass not only literary texts but also their avatars in earlier oral traditions and subsequent performative ones as well as their translation into material objects. Among questions to be addressed are the porousness of territorial boundaries in the Mediterranean region before the consolidation of modern nation-states; the circulation and transmission of literary conventions within such a fluid reality; and the relationship of cultural production to structures of political, social, and religious power. The eclectic materials taken into consideration here come from widely diverse – but nevertheless interconnected – linguistic and cultural ecologies, and they move across a long temporal arc. Through their encounter with these resources, students will come to understand the Mediterranean as a space that can be defined beyond established geo-political barriers as a world that has been constructed through historical contingencies and in imaginative – sometimes contentious, often kinetic – engagement with them.
Cross Listed Courses
COLT 53.05