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

ARTR 2500

The course looks into social polemics of receiving and accepting certain texts in the Arabic world and how these texts crisscross with social and political taboos with all ensuing problems of censorship, banning and confiscation of artistic works, mainly novels by famous authors and novelists in a number of Arab countries. Those writers include Naguib Mahfouz and Yusuf Idriss of Egypt, Mohamed Shukry of Morocco, Salwa al-Naeemi of Lebanon, among others.

ARAB 2270

Culture and Society in the Contemporary Arab Middle East
Ahmad Obiedat
MW 2-3:15pm

This course will address some of the religious, socio-political, and historical factors that have contributed to the shaping of the Arab Middle East and Arab identity(s) in the modern age. Starting with the rise of Islam in the 7th century A.D., touching upon the Ottoman Empire, the remapping of the Middle East due to British and French colonialism during the period of the two World Wars, and finally ending with the Gulf and Iraq wars, this course will help students gain an understanding of the diversity and unity of Modern Arab culture, and the complexity of its politics.

We will read a variety of genres including: historical documents, travel accounts, cultural criticism, and novels while we investigate concepts such as: nationalism, identity, and religion. Other issues to be discussed are: gender and social change in the contemporary Arab world, the question of Palestine and its impact on modern Arab self-image, the Arab image in the West particularly after 9/11, and civil war’s impact on changing gender roles in the region.

ARAB 4020

Advanced Arabic IV
Miled Faiza
MW 2-3:15pm

The main goal at this stage is to reach a superior level of Modern Standard Arabic with due attention paid to all four language skills: speaking, listening, reading and writing in addition to culture. Acquisition of more advanced grammatical structures will take place primarily through directed in-class drilling, coupled with an emphasis on the functional use of language through communication in context.

Pre-requisite: ARAB 4010 (ARAB4559) or an equivalent proficiency level as determined through a placement test.

Required Texts and Material:
1-     Brustad, Kristen, Mahmoud Al-Batal, and Abbas Al-Tonsi. Al-Kitaab fii Ta’allum al-‘Arabiyya: A Textbook for Beginning Arabic, Part Three. Second edition. Georgetown University Press, 2004.
2-     Supplementary material to be distributed in class.

ARAB 5860

Nineteenth Century Arabic Prose
Mohammed Sawaie
TR 2-3:15pm

Examination of Arabic writing in the 19th century, a period of renaissance in the Arabic language.  Prerequisite: ARAB 583 and 584, or instructor permission.

ARAB 7000

Teaching Arabic as a Second Language
Abdulkareem Said Ramadan
TR 10:45am - 12:15pm

The purpose of this course is to study the Teaching of Arabic as a Second Language/Bilingual Education. Students will examine the methods and techniques of teaching: listening, speaking, reading, writing, and content area language instruction to second language speakers. Assessment, cultural awareness, and self-evaluation of teaching and materials will also be addressed.

Pre-requisite: ARAB 4020 or an equivalent proficiency level as determined through a placement test, or instructor permission.

BENG 1020

This course is designed for students who already got some elementary knowledge about Bengali language and want an effective, comprehensive approach to learn Bengali that will enable them to make fast, solid progress in all four language skills: speaking, listening, reading, and writing. At the completion of this course, students will be able to carry on real conversations in social situations, such as informal and formal interactions with people, giving and receiving directions, making purchases at stores, or describing some problems to another person. They will also be able to write short sentences on different issues with minimum grammatical errors.

BENG 2559

At the end of the semester, the students will be able to perform tasks with conjugation, tenses and verb patterns. They will be able to describe themselves by using elementary sentences and express personal experiences, discuss some topics abstractly, especially those relating to their particular interests and special fields of expertise. They will be able to provide a structured argument to support their opinions. The students will be able to read consistently with a satisfactory understanding of short paragraphs on factual information. The students will be able to write short paragraphs about a variety of topics with significant detail.

SAST 4559

Description TBA.

SATR 1100

The present course focuses on writings by Indians (mainly Bengali writers) during the colonial period to examine the existing relational nature between the coloniser (Britons) and the colonized (Indians). In doing so the course also focuses on the wider significance of Bengali writings how they encapsulated discourses on nation, race and gender. Bengali intelligentsias were deeply engaged in the colonial enterprise from its beginning and recorded their observation of their masters in various forms of writings such as travel narratives, essays, novels and short stories. The various forms of literary productions that the course examines show Indians fashioning their own identities within a critical space framed by their metropolitan location, nationalist aspirations and the cultural politics of representation. Literary productions from this period also bear evidence of a close self-conscious scrutiny of imperial Britain that steps out of received paradigms of East-West encounters, and in the process reconstitutes both imperial/metropolitan and colonial identities. Unlike the prevalent model in understanding such cultural encounters, in this course Indians and their writings are seen as active interlocutors at the cultural interface, especially during the nationalist period.

SATR 3559

Dalit literature, is the most important literary movement to emerge in post-independence India. It is the voice of the most marginalized segment of India’s population, those formerly known as untouchables. Deemed untouchable through religious diktat, members of this lowest stratum of the Hindu caste system now call themselves “Dalit” (the term literally means “ground down”) to express their resistance to a three thousand year old socio-religious practice that denies them their basic human rights. Though ‘untouchability’ was abolished in 1950 when India adopted a new Constitution after independence from British rule, it still lingers on, especially among the rural population. Until the advent of Dalit literature, the lives of Dalits had seldom been recorded in Indian literatures, which were traditionally the domain of the privileged high-castes.