Mediterranean Humanities I

Mediterranean Humanities I (Med Hum) explores the literatures of the Mediterranean from the late Middle Ages until the early Eighteenth Century. We will read Boccaccio, Bandello, and Cervantes, Ottoman and Arabic travel literature, as well as the Eurasian versions of the One Thousand and One Nights. We will dive into the travel of texts and people, stories and storytellers across the shores of the Middle Sea, as well as into the relationship between literary texts and historiographical theories of the Mediterranean. Based on the reading of literary texts (short stories, theater), as well as letters, biographies, memoirs, and other ego-documents produced and consumed in the Early Modern Mediterranean, we will discuss big themes as Orientalism, estrangement, forced mobility, connectivity, multiculturalism and the clash of civilizations. Also, we will visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Rare Books Room of Butler Library, and we will discuss movies in class. Following in the footsteps of Fernand Braudel, we will reflect on the Mediterranean in the age of the first globalization as a laboratory of the modern global world and world literature.