Course: English 271 (DL, WI) Stories from “the Holy Land”
Course Description
How do writers of memoir represent “the Holy Land?” As the world turns its eye on recent upheavals in the Middle East, what can we learn from writers from different groups who have lived in this region and the family stories they have decided to tell? What is the responsibility of the reader to these different histories? There is perhaps no site more associated with competing truth claims and contested narratives than a land termed alternately “Eastern” and “Western,” “Asiatic” and “European,” “sacred” and “profane,” a “start-up nation” of future and promise and a land mired hopelessly in a past of misdeeds and crimes as yet unaccounted for, a land whose various names themselves represent conflict and contestation: Israel/Palestine/“the Holy Land.”
In this course, students will read recently published memoirs from writers from this region as well as from secondary sources that offer useful critical and theoretical frameworks for analysis. We shall use memoirs from this real and imagined homeland as a site for analyzing the persuasive power of memoir, taking into consideration its appeal to both affect and intellect. This course will raise questions about autobiographical writing and (inherited) trauma, the politics of memory, and the problematics associated with writing personal history. Students will write a reading response to each assigned text. The reading responses will alternately take the form of rhetorical analysis, literary analysis, or creative nonfiction. In addition, students will read a memoir of their choosing and write a scholarly analysis of their chosen text that they present to the class. Finally, students will embark on research and writing projects of their own design relevant to the course material.
Student Learning Outcomes
This course will help students to use the skills of literary, rhetorical, and/or cultural analysis they acquired in their first-year English course with increased proficiency by continuing to teach students how to analyze the significance of cultural, biographical, historical, and/or philosophical contexts. Students will deepen their understanding of the complexity of differentiating between fact and fiction and of determining reliability in self-disclosure and self-censorship. They will also deepen their understanding of the central role of confession in life writing as well as the roles memory and language play in the construction of meaning and identity.
Required Texts
Bashir, Yousef. The Words of My Father.
Biale, Rachel. Growing Up Below Sea Level: A Kibbutz Childhood.
Jabra, Ibrahim Jabra. The First Well: A Bethlehem Boyhood.
Hayoun, Massoud. When We Were Arabs: A Jewish Family’s Forgotten History.
Karmi, Ghada. Return: A Palestinian Memoir.
Oz, Amos. A Tale of Love and Darkness.
A memoir selected by the student
Additional secondary readings, distributed via pdf, may include selections from theoretical/critical texts such as Couser, G. Thomas. Memoir: An Introduction; Smith, Sidonie and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life; Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflection on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism; Butler, Judith. Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism. Fuchs, Esther. Israeli Women’s Studies: A Reader; Kassem, Fatma. Palestinian Women: Narrative Histories and Gendered Memory; Khalidi, Rashid. Palestinian Identity; Lévinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity; Said, Edward. Reflections on Exile: And Other Literary and Cultural Essays.