University of Denver ● English Department ● bkiteley@du.edu ● 303-871-2898 ● My Office: Sturm Hall 487C

TEXTS:  Francis Steegmuller, Flaubert in Egypt; Max Rodenbeck, Cairo: the City Victorious; Naguib Mahfouz, Miramar;  Alifa Rifaat, Distant View of the Minaret; Amitav Ghosh, In an Antique Land; Lila Abu-Lughod, Veiled Sentiments; An Egyptian guide book (which will not be assigned, but you should bring the book to every class).  Also an excerpt of Lucie Duff Gordon’s Letters from Egypt (this is a link to about 20 pages of her letters).  FILMS: Youssef Chahine, “Cairo Station,” “Alexandria... Why?” and selected shorts.

COURSE DESCRIPTION:  This course is about relatively modern Egypt, NOT ancient or Pharaonic Egypt.  Egypt has one of the oldest civilizations in the world.  Its written and architectural records date back over five thousand years.  Our readings will scrape only the surface of that history.  We will read foreign and native descriptions of Cairo and Egypt, beginning with Gustave Flaubert’s journals and letters home in the 1850s.  The course will be a means of traveling to another country and culture.

EXPECTATIONS AND GOALS:  Knowing who you are means knowing where you are.  All reading is a form of travel.  In this course 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.  Egypt has had the good and back 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 will 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.

THE BASICS:  This course is an introduction to the college experience.  First-Year Seminars are designed to provide you with an in-depth academic experience that is both rigorous and engaging.  I'll help you to develop the kinds of academic skills that should prepare you for successful college work, including writing, critical reading and thinking, discussion, argument and debate.  This aspect of the course may seem like the least interesting part of it, but it will be useful.  When I was an undergraduate, no one spoke to me about the essential tools of being a student.  I never learned how to take notes in class or in a book.  I never had useful instruction about writing papers—it was expected that we would know these things.  I was a bad student in college, and I'm here to tell you it is possible to overcome such insufficiencies, but I wish someone had taken me aside when I was a first-year student and given me just a little bit of advice.

I am a fiction writer, a professor of literature, and the director of the creative writing program.  I understand the way all writing is built by inspiration and creative impulse.  I've written a book to help young writers provoke creativity (The 3 A.M. Epiphany), and I will use something a lot like the exercises in this book to provoke you into expository and creative insight into your readings.  You may not think that writing well is crucial to being a good biology or engineering major, for instance.  But I believe you'll find that writing is understanding—we don't know what we've read and thought about until we have talked it out and written it down clearly and comprehensively.  I also expect you to come to every class prepared to talk about what we've read.  I may assign questions the class before, but I also expect you to bring insightful and interesting questions with you.

ASSIGNMENTS:  You will write four pieces of prose, minimum 800 words (about three 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 that try to synthesize the readings (and/or films) and the experience of writing travel prose.  You will also write three short email response papers (around 400 words) assigned between the more formal papers.  Students will read an average of 80 pages per class session.  Late papers and email responses 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.  Here is some advice on writing papers.  And here's some very good and concise advice on writing from Paul Graham, an essayist, computer programmer, and programming language designer.

Here are some of the topics—both very general and specific—which we'll discuss in class around the formal writing assignments:

Critical reading and writing
Expository writing
Definitions
Argument
Exercises in travel
Faked travel writing
Fiction based on research
Fiction based on experience
Fiction based on anthropology
Rewrite a Rifaat story or part of Miramar from a minor character’s point of view
Write beyond the end of one of these stories or Miramar

SCHEDULE OF PAPERS AND EMAIL RESPONSE PAPERS:

Email response 1: Thu, Sept 21
Paper 1: Thu, Sept 28
Paper 2: Tu, Oct 12
Email response 2: Thu, Oct 19
Paper 3 (the creative assignment): Thu Oct 26
Email response 3: Tu, Nov 7
Paper 4: Thu, Nov 16

GRADES:  The four papers will be equally weighted (20% for each one, and 20% for all three of the email response papers).  Discussion during class will not be graded, but if you talk regularly, and if I become familiar with your thoughts and reading habits during the term, you will very likely receive a slightly higher grade.  I feel sympathy for students I’ve gotten to know personally during the term.  Attendance will affect your grade differently.

ATTENDANCE:  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 part of a letter grade (from A to A-, for example).  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.  These are tough rules.  I mean them, but I am also a reasonable and forgiving person once you get to know me.

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.

THE SCHEDULE:

Flaubert in Egypt and Lucie Duff Gordon (this is a link to about 20 pages of her letters)

Sept 14 Flaubert, 1-96
Sept 19 Flaubert, 97-213 (plus, read the Lucie Duff Gordon material—about 20 pages—on the course page)

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

Max Rodenbeck

Sept 21 Rodenbeck, An Orientation (pages xi to xviii) and 3-95—1st email response due
Sept 26 Rodenbeck, 184-267

Living abroad as a foreigner; history as poetry—poetic history; marrying Egypt; a book written over a lifetime (as opposed to Flaubert’s book, which was the result of six months in Egypt).

Naguib Mahfouz

Sept 28 Film—1st paper due
Oct 3 Mahfouz, 1-86
Oct 5 Mahfouz, 87-181

The novel; allegory and character; history of the Egyptian revolution and the British in Egypt before that; Socialism and the Pan-Arab movement; Alexandria vs. Cairo.

Alifa Rifaat

Oct 10 Rifaat, 1-4, 13-16, 23-28, 29-38, 55-60, 77-88, 113-116
Oct 12, Film—2nd paper due

Feminism and tradition; Islam and women; the novel vs. the short story; the rituals and customs of Islam.

Amitav Ghosh

Oct 17 Ghosh, 13-105
Oct 19 Ghosh, 107-174—2nd email response due
Oct 24 Ghosh, 174-237, but we’ll watch a film this class
Oct 26 Ghosh, 291-353—3rd paper due (creative piece)

History and travel; anthropology (failed) and travel; archeology and trash; travel over and through time (with narrative intact); anthropology of oppositions (India and Egypt); two Others (an Indian observing Egypt).

Lila Abu-Lughod

Oct 31 Abu-Lughod, 1-77
Nov 2 Abu-Lughod 78-117
Nov 7 Abu-Lughod, 118-167—3rd email response due
Nov 9 Abu-Lughod, 171-207
Nov 14 Abu-Lughod, 208-271
Nov 16 Last class—4th paper due

Emotional anthropology; poetry and anthropology; Bedouins vs. Egyptians; an outsider (a Palestinian-American studying a familiar but foreign culture, Egyptian Bedouins) disguised as an insider; intersubjectivity: deception or lying by omission; time broken up.

EGYPT LINKS

An obituary for Naguib Mahfouz in Slate
Mahfouz on Mahfouz in Al Ahram
Random House’s book group page for Mahfouz
A Guide to Naguib Mahfouz's novels and life
Mahfouz’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech
An interview with Mahfouz
A paper on Mahfouz’s later works
A brief piece on Alifa Rifaat (scroll down to nearly the end)

A book review of a recent Flaubert biography
This is a link to all of Lucie Duff Gordon's book Letters from Egypt
A little history lesson on the Suez Crisis in 1956
Max Rodenbeck on Osama bin Laden in the New York Review of Books
Max Rodenbeck's essay "Islam Confronts Its Demons"
Some of the highlights of Max Rodenbeck's Cairo: the City Victorious
An Egyptian in Colorado (1948-1950)

A map of Egypt
A photo essay of Egypt in the Washington Post (you have to register, but it's free)

An article on Muslim resentment in Britain
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
Geocities Guide
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