CMLT 130 - Love and Sexuality in the Literary Arts of the Mediterranean

The Mediterranean region, with its dense weave of historical encounters, has long been a site of intimacies and entanglements, love and war. What is it about love that brings out the most tender and the most violent impulses at the same time? In this course we will explore the concepts of self and other, reflection, agency, representation, and reciprocity as they figure in Mediterranean literary, artistic, and musical treatments of love and sexuality. We will open with a look at “Song of Songs,” a foundational love story from the Hebrew literary tradition. With Edward Said’s Orientalism as a theoretical anchor, we will look at intimate encounters between East and West in works such as Ahdaf Soueif’s In the Eye of the Sun. Moving into present-day Israel-Palestine, we will explore works that feature romantic entanglements between Israeli-Jews and Palestinians. These texts foreground some of the thorniest questions regarding love: Can we really love outside of ourselves? Where is the line between self-love and self-loathing? The course closes with a unit on love and sexuality in the digital age and a look at questions of voyeurism, exposure, rumors, and scandal. (Group III) (Diversity)