New Course Offerings -- J-Term 2009

ARAB 320

Advanced Arabic Media and Culture
Omima el-Araby
Jan 2 - 10 from 9:00 am - 2:00 pm

The course aims to enrich the students’ command of the four language skills; listening, reading, writing, and speaking through an immersion in authentic Arabic-language materials and a simulation of real-life Arab-world situations. Students will undertake linguistic tasks typical of what an educated native speaker of Arabic does on a daily basis, thus building upon their knowledge of grammar and core vocabulary to apply it to the demands of real world use. Such tasks will include reading Arabic newspapers, listening to Arabic television, watching Arabic movies, and studying landmark writings from Arabic literature. This course also connects students with the Charlottesville Arab community by inviting native speakers to lead target-language discussions of course materials. Students will also practice writing for meaningful purposes in essays and daily journals, and they will do presentations--all in the Arabic language.

New Course Offerings -- Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures

ARAB 226

Conversational Egyptian Arabic
Omima el-Araby
MWF 10:00-10:50

Although forms of conversational Arabic vary widely from one Arab country to another, one dialect is understood throughout the Arab world: the Egyptian Dialect. This course focuses on the spoken Arabic of Cairo, a dialect that is widely used throughout Egypt in everyday conversation. It is also the dialect that dominates in mass media and popular culture. This class integrates the explanation of grammar with the introduction of vocabulary into cohesive thematic units that present the language as it is used in authentic situations of daily life. The focus of the class is to enable students to converse with native speakers of Arabic through providing listening and speaking opportunities. This course is designed for students who are at the intermediate level of proficiency.

Prerequisite: ARAB 202 or equivalent, or instructor permission.

ARAB 311

ARAB 511

The course aims to move students from an intermediate to an advanced level in Modern Standard Arabic. Attention is paid to all four language skills -- speaking, listening, reading and writing -- and materials begin to focus more intensively on culture, as vocabulary expansion become a point of emphasis. This course is designed to introduce you to Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) language and cultures of the Arabic-speaking world. It is based on the communicative approach in language teaching and learning.

Prerequisite: ARAB 310 or equivalent, or instructor permission
Materials: Al-Kitaab, Part 2 (Second Edition) & Supplementary materials related to the topics in the textbooks to be distributed in class.

ARAB 587

Media Arabic (ARAB 587) is a fourth year level language & culture course (Monday-Wednesday, 14:00 - 15:15) that aims at honing linguistic skills in Arabic language and founding a solid cultural background. As for the linguistic skills, it aims to cover the most important keywords and vocabulary, and to introduce the writing style in the domains of daily news, politics, economics, and social ideologies. Analyzing up-to-date journalistic essays is the core task, plus discussing the daily headlines selected from various newspapers. The last 20 minutes of every session is dedicated to watching and discussing up-to-date mini-news bulletins and clips in Arabic.  In addition, the course aims to train the students to be a direct receiver-researcher of the Arabic news even before it gets translated into American media. Also, it informs the students how to find general online press and news websites in Arab countries and how to build the habit of utilizing audiovisual broadcasting daily. Some specialized websites are visited to meet various political, economic, and cultural research interests. An important merit of this course is how to access and evaluate the self-representation expressed in the media coming from the South compared to that coming from the North. Fulfilling the requirements of Media Arabic opens new horizons to conduct up-to-date graduate and undergraduate research and publications.

PETR 332

PETR 532

In the old and turbulent history of Iran, women have relied on words as their weapon of choice to struggle for peace and justice.  Their foremother, Scheherazade, knew the futility of fighting injustice with violence.  For one thousand and one nights, under the looming threat of having her head chopped off, she resorted to the magical power of words and storytelling to cure a serial killer, her husband King Shahriyar.  Like Scheherazade, Iranian women writers continue to find solace and strength in the limitless power of words. 

Since the mid nineteenth-century, Iranian women writers have desegregated a predominantly all-male literary tradition.  They have also been at the forefront of a bloodless social movement.  At home and in Diaspora, they have produced highly-acclaimed bestsellers, touching the hearts and minds of an international reading public on an unprecedented scale.  This course studies this inspiring presence on the world stage through a variety of genre and, in particular, life narratives.

No knowledge of the Persian language or literature is required.

PERS 423
PERS 523

Shahnamah
Alireza Korangy
TR 14:00-15:15

Shahnama, 'The Epic of Kingship', is perhaps the most heralded epic work in the history of Persian verse. It presents to the reader not only a glimpse into the Iranian fervor for nationalism after the Arab invasion of Iran in the 7th century AD, but also a linguistic attempt by Firdowsi to put forth a truly Persian epic via a lexicon that utilizes a minimal crop of Arabic words. The imagery in Shahnama is some of the finest in Persian verse. Rhetorically it is a tour-de-force of facility imbued with historico-ethical pun. This course will approach this indispensable work of poetic genius on several levels: historical, poetic, and linguistic. An insight into Shahnama will afford students a historical projection into contemporary Iranian life and thought, ever-so-present in the mainstream discourse of Iranian social paradigm. Pre-requisite: Completion of at least 2 years of Persian or instructor permission.

Indian Society and Politics
Rina Williams
MW 10:00-10:50

The course will provide an overview and introduction to the social and cultural mosaic of India through the lens of politics. Particular attention will be paid to India’s “democratic exceptionalism”: defying the post-colonial experience of most of the developing world, India has remained a democracy virtually throughout its independent history. The course examines both the historical factors that have allowed India to sustain this remarkable record; some of the modern divisions that have, at times, threatened to tear the country apart, including religion, language, gender, and caste; and the evolution of India’s economic and foreign policies in the context of democracy. In order to convey a broad view of Indian society and politics, material will be drawn from a wide range of sources, including academic works; works of novelists, journalists and political leaders; and films and videos. No prior knowledge of India is required or assumed.

Women Writing in India and Pakistan

Womanhood may be perceived as a kinship and understood through shared experience. However, perception is often skewed by the limitations of our cultural and epistemic stance. Gender is a social construct; women's identities and subjectivities are shaped within the socio-cultural constraints of their own society. One of our chief concerns in understanding women in the non-Western world is the handicap of our own perspective, that is, the western feminist perspective. Our claims of kinship with non-Western women are often tenuous. For us in this course, it is important to ask how women's experiences have touched upon women's writing on the whole. Does this writing address itself to certain questions? How do the women themselves see such writing? Was it/is it marginal or central to their lives? Can we detect any regionality in them? Is there any relationship between women writing and women's movements, and/or other political activism? The diversity and pluralism of the Indian subcontinent provides an excellent ground for contextualizing the discourse between literature and gender.  Each region has its own culture and language.  We will read and critique the fiction and poetry of culturally specific regions while reflecting on the assumption that experiences and identities are fundamentally gendered.  We will explore issues associated with women writing in regional languages to writing in mainstream languages like Hindi, Urdu and English.  We will also examine how the publication and dissemination of women's texts are related to the women movements in India and Pakistan and to South Asian Literature as a whole.
Requirements: Class Journal, Two presentations, Two short essays and a Final Project.
Notes: Class satisifies Non-Western requirement. Readings completed in English.

The love-lyric (ghazal) has been central to Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, Turkish and Urdu traditions. It has also had a strong influence on European conceptions of love and love-lyric. The classical ghazal’s main theme is unrequited love and the ghazal poet deals with matters relating to love in the widest possible context. The object of desire may be human (male or female), divine, abstract or ambiguous; its defining trait is its inaccessibility.
In this course we will read selections from some of the best classical Urdu and Persian lyric poetry. We will learn about the conventions of love in Urdu literary culture and the poetics of the ghazal in general. We will explore the different possibilities of interpretation: how the line between sacred and profane love (ishq) is often blurred, the relationship of poetry to mystical inspiration and so on. One of the central themes of exploration will be the concept of originality and what it means in the ghazal tradition. A sub-theme will be the space of translation in a poetics where ‘rewriting’ and ‘originality’ elude the nets of precise definition. Poems will be read in modern English translations. No pre requisites.

Requirements and Expectations:
Course work will include writing interpretive analyses of selected poems, 1-2 pages (an exercise in exploring the range of possible meanings contained in the verses of a selected ghazal); an oral presentation; and a final paper, 8-10 pages, on a topic of the student’s choice, to be worked out in consultation with the instructor. The highlight of the class will be a mushairah  (performance) in which students will present their own ghazals.

SANS 702

Sanskrit Literary Theory

Throughout ancient and medieval India many texts were written in Sanskrit on literary theory. These texts focus on what poetry is, as opposed to other collections of words, and how certain combinations of words and sounds enhance poetic beauty while other combinations detract from that beauty. In the spring of 2009 we read the Kavyadarsha by Dandin.

Prerequisite: at least two semesters of SANS courses beyond SANS 102/502.

New Course Offerings -- SUMMER SESSIONS 2009

ARAB 101

Elementary Arabic I
Omima el-Araby
Session I: T.B.D.

ARAB 102

Elementary Arabic II
Shadi Bayadsy
Session II: T.B.D.

ARAB 201

Elementary Arabic I
Shadi Bayadsy
Session I: T.B.D.

ARAB 202

Elementary Arabic II
Omima el-Araby
Session II: T.B.D.

Future Courses -- Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures

PETR 342
PETR 542

Sufi Thought in Iran
Alireza Korangy
TO BE OFFERED FALL 09

Mannerisms of Iranian mystical life are a faithful mirror reflection of the texts and the poetics, whcih so passionately preach them. It is noteworthy that such a discourse will point to a theosophical manifesto that differentiates widely from the philosophies employed by many of the other Sufi circles in the region (Turkey, Syria, etc.). This is due to the many classifications that could only be coined Iranian, whether philologically, historically, philosophically, or linguistically. The inter-textuality, so predominant in Iranian mysticism, points to rhetoric that is rich and intellectually multifarious. This course will introduce ample cross-references between the classical notions of this phenomenon and the modern day re-enactments, which have conveyed themselves not only through the many contemporary artisitc expressions but such important cultural phenomena as literature, martyrdom, and historical outlook in modern-day Iran.