Classroom: SH 490 ● Class times: MW 12-1:50 ● Office hours: W 2-3:30, Th 4-5:30 or by appointment ● bkiteley@du.edu ● 303-871-2898 ● My Office: SH 487C

 

TEXTS:  Francis Steegmuller, Flaubert in Egypt; Alifa Rifaat, Distant View of the Minaret; Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North; Alaa al Aswany, The Yacoubian Building; Amitav Ghosh, In an Antique Land; Lila Abu-Lughod, Veiled Sentiments.  FILMS: Youssef Chahine, “Alexandria... Why?,” and selected short films.

 

ATTENDANCE AND CLASS PARTICIPATION:  Participation is crucial in this class—when you ask questions or make comments, you will be much more likely to understand the material we're discussing.  We don't know our thoughts well until we speak them or write them down.  Talking will also pass the time more quickly.  I hope you will try to speak up occasionally, when I call on you and even when I don't.  I also expect you to attend class regularly.  You are allowed a total of two absences for any reason during the quarter.  Each absence after that second will lower your course grade by one letter grade.  If you miss more than four classes, you will fail the course.  If you must miss a class, email me (bkiteley@du.edu) in advance.

 

COURSE DESCRIPTION:  This course is about relatively modern Egypt.  The course is NOT about ancient or pharaonic Egypt.  In Versions of Egypt we will read foreign and native descriptions of Cairo and Egypt, beginning with French writer Gustave Flaubert’s journals and letters home in the 1850s.  The class will be a means of traveling to another country and culture.

 

All reading is a form of travel, and the readings in this course circle around the subject of Cairo and Egypt.  We'll explore anthropology, history, religious studies, and urban studies, applied to this one country.  Why is the course called "Versions of Egypt"?  There are many different versions of Egypt, just as there are many different versions of Denver or Kansas City or Guadalajara.  The image at the left shows an Egyptian man smoking a cigarette, dwarfed by a billboard painting of the iconic American image of the Marlboro Man.  Cairo is full of McDonald's, Kentucky Fried Chickens, even Roy Rogers restaurants; much of its modern architecture is borrowed from France and the west.  Egyptian peasants are called baladi, a kind of insult, although it means literally "of the country."  Egypt has also had the good and bad luck to be a magnet for tourism for centuries, which has created quite a few permanent misreadings of the country.  Even the English name Egypt comes from the ancient Greeks.  The Egyptians call their country and capital city Masr.

 

We will study the effects and aftereffects of colonialism and the way Europeans and Americans understand themselves in relation to Islam and the Middle East.  We will compare creative and critical approaches to thinking about a subject.  An unusual aspect of the course will be the travelogues you write, as if you had been to Egypt yourself, built slowly out of exercises triggered by images, the readings, and even sensory experience (smelling Egyptian perfumes, for example).  The course will train you in both creative and expository writing methods, revealing the relationship between these two apparent poles of thinking and writing.  You will learn some of the essential component parts of fiction, film, anthropology, history, and travel writing, looking at the ways these genres and disciplines differ and interact when the subject is Egypt.  You will write critical and creative essays on what you find in the readings, from documentary and fictional films, and from slides.  We'll discuss parts of the travelogues you write in something like a fiction workshop, looking simply at how the writing works and doesn’t work, and how the writer has incorporated intriguing details from the readings and films.

 

This class is among the group of Core courses called COMMUNITIES and ENVIRONMENTS and it includes such topics as:  the relationships between human groups and their social, natural, constructed, and aesthetic environments; the social and cultural institutions (e.g., family, state, science, religion) that govern these relationships; issues of global prosperity, justice, and security; ecological balance and sustainability; the ethical foundations and environmental consequences of the human inventions (e.g. biomedical and information technologies), conventions (e.g., international commerce and communication) and norms that organize life on local and global scales.

 

ASSIGNMENTS:  Four papers, minimum 1200 words (about five pages double-spaced).  One of these essays will be an attempt at imaginary travel writing (to be set in Egypt); three will be expository essays on a synthesis of the readings (and/or films) and the experience of writing travel prose.  You'll also do a formal rewrite of the first or second paper.  You will read an average of 70 pages per class session.  The four papers (and the rewrite) are each worth 20% of your grade.  Late papers will count as a class absence.  Do not send me attachments of papers.  I want hard copies in hand the day of class they’re due.  Discussion during class will not be graded, but if you do talk, and if I become familiar with your thoughts and reading habits during the term, you will very likely receive a slightly higher grade.  I am human—I feel sympathy for students I’ve gotten to know personally during the term.  Attendance will affect your grade differently (see above, ATTENDANCE AND CLASS PARTICIPATION above).  Here is some advice on writing papers.

 

GOALS:  You will come to understand by the end of the term how these three different types of books work—travel writing, fiction, and anthropology.  We'll spend a good deal of the class on relatively simple definitions and descriptions of these genres.  We will also try to make clear the distinctions between expository and creative writing.  All writing is creative writing, but the writing you do on the readings (two of the three papers) are a form of applied reading.  The creative paper will be another form of creative reading, using skills you may not think you had at the beginning of the term.  I'll have you do many brief exercises in class well before the creative paper is due, to work on those muscles.

 

WARNING:  Francis Steegmuller’s Flaubert in Egypt is a wonderful and entertaining book, but it contains several vivid and graphic scenes of a sexual nature.  Flaubert wrote in his journals and in letters to one friend much of this sort of scene—private material that Steegmuller and we are plundering.  Anyone who prefers not to read this sort of writing should not sign up for this class.

 

SCHEDULE:

January 4—First class

Flaubert in Egypt:  What is travel writing?  Why do we travel?  What do we see when we travel?  Three-part process (letters, journals, editor); romanticism to realism; ecstasy to boredom; photography and travel.

January 6—Flaubert, 9-103
January 11—Flaubert, 103-222

Timothy Mitchell:  The invention of objectivity; subjectivity; the rise of the realist novel; photographing and documenting the world; the Paris Exhibition and modern notions of shopping and situating the self in the world.

January 13—The first chapter of Timothy Mitchell's Colonising Egypt

Alaa al Aswany:  The novel; allegory and character; the history of the Egyptian revolution and the British in Egypt before that; Socialism and the Pan-Arab movement; Islam and contemporary life; “Emergency Rule”; Mubarrak and democracy.

January 18—Martin Luther King Day—No class

January 20—Alaa al Aswany, The Yacoubian Building, 3-106
January 25—Alaa al Aswany, The Yacoubian Building, 107-175
January 27—Alaa al Aswany, The Yacoubian Building, 175-246— first paper due (here is some advice on writing papers)

Tayeb Salih:  The Heart of Darkness and its mirror; the novel and travel; politics and fiction; colonial and postcolonial life; miscegenation.

February 1—Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North, 1-60
February 3—Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North, 61-104
February 8—Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North, 105-169 —second  paper due

Alifa Rifaat:  Feminism and tradition; Islam and women; the novel vs. the short story; the rituals and customs of Islam; love and death and the death of love.

February 10—Alifa Rifaat, Distant View of the Minaret, 1-4, 13-16, 23-28, 29-38, 39-46, 55-60, 77-88, 113-116
February 15—Film, “Alexandria… Why?”

Amitav Ghosh:  History and travel; anthropology (failed) and travel; archeology and trash; travel over and through time (with narrative intact); two Others (an Indian observing Egypt). 

February 17—Amitav Ghosh, In an Antique Land, 13-80—third paper due (travel piece)
February 22— Amitav Ghosh, In an Antique Land, 179-237
February 24— Amitav Ghosh, In an Antique Land, 291-353

Lila Abu-Lughod:  Emotional and psychological anthropology; an outsider (a Palestinian-American studying a familiar but foreign culture, Egyptians) disguised as an insider; poetry and anthropology; poetry and culture; "father" and daughter; dissembling for cause.

March 1—Abu-Lughod, Veiled Sentiments—rewrite of first or second paper due
March 3—Abu-Lughod, Veiled Sentiments
March 8—Abu-Lughod, Veiled Sentiments

March 10—Last class—fourth paper due

Egypt links

 

An article in The New Yorker about an Egyptian-born al-Qaeda operative who has rejected violence

An op-ed piece in the Washington Post (registration required) on political repression in Egypt

An essay on religious freedom in the Muslim world, by Christopher Dickey, in the Washington Post

An essay on the relationship between terrorism, propaganda, and ideology by Christopher Dickey, in Newsweek

About Lila Abu-Lughod's Dramas of Nationhood

A review of Dramas of Nationhood in Egypt's English language newspaper Al-Ahram

A 1992 New York Times essay on Hilmiyya Nights, among other Egyptian television and film stories

A brief piece on Alifa Rifaat (scroll down to nearly the end)
A map of Egypt
On the 2006 elections in Egypt (available only to DU students)
A piece on the military governments in Egypt, Turkey, and Algeria
A New York Times Magazine article on an Egyptian preacher
Front Line Egypt web photo essay
On learning Arabic, in Slate
Al Ahram newspaper—Egypt’s largest daily (the name means The Pyramids)
Egypt Today magazine
Lonely Planet guide to Egypt
American University in Cairo (AUC) home page
AUC’s Islamic Cairo walking tour page
Tour Egypt guide
Maxime du Camp’s photographs of Egypt
A huge source of photographs (type in Cairo, Egypt)
American Embassy in Egypt
PBS News Hour story on Cairo
PBS Nova story on the Pyramids

Notes on Travel and Theory by James Clifford
The introduction to Clifford’s Predicament of Culture

 

Brian Kiteley’s home page