Speciality Requirements Student must complete 24 credit hours

Course Code	Course Name	Credit Hours	Prerequests
432601	Critical Theory	3
The course offers a solid grounding in current issues of literary criticism, their historical origins, development and application. A major portion of the course is devoted to the reading and discussion of major critical theories, including but not limited to, The New Criticism, Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, Marxism, The New Historicism, Feminism and Cultural Criticism. These approaches will be applied to a selected short literary text. The practical application of theory is achieved through common reading of the text in question, and through study of a series of diverse essays that discuss and analyze that text.
432602	Seminar in Comparative Literature	3
The seminar is designed to provide thorough, extensive practice in research methods and in the mastery of recent criticism on comparative literature. Part of the course will be devoted to exposing students to the requirements of scholarly writing. Another part will cover learning how to trace and then analyze the critical conversations circulating around the selected topic, focusing on the most recent criticism. This part will require students to write numerous summaries and an annotated bibliography. The final part will involve writing a research paper that incorporates original ideas and demonstrates ability to do research. The course will also include a conference presentation component. Topics covered in the seminars: emergence and development of the field of comparative literature, questions of comparative literature and multiculturalism, globalization, postcolonialism, exile, emigre, memory studies, digital culture, and translation studies.
432603	Postcolonial Theory and Literature	3
This course engages with key aesthetic, critical and theoretical debates in postcolonial literary studies, with an emphasis on its comparative nature. From the theoretical emergence of the field in the 1970s, to most recent theoretical-conceptual iterations, the course will place critical theory alongside a range of literatures from the `postcolonial? world, including Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and the Near and Middle East. While addressing representations contingent upon colonialism and neo-colonialism, imperialism and neo-imperialism, this course navigates the issues of the construction of nation and national cultures, identity politics, nationalism, language, place, space, mobility, race, history, education and ethnicity in postcolonial societies and diasporic experiences, and assesses the dialectical relation between postcolonialism and postmodernism while exploring themes like exile and hybridity.
432604	Exile and Emigre Literature	3
This course navigates the global refugee, exilic and emigre crises, demonstrating that the modern age is `the age of the refugee, the displaced person, mass immigration? (Edward Said, Reflections on Exile, p.174). Using a comparative approach, this course examines the notion of displacement in all its forms - exile, expatriation, migration, nomadism, travel - which is the concept or the theme of modern(ist) and contemporary literature (Carenkaplan, Question of Travel, p.48). We look at exilic and emigre experiences as represented by many canonical literary works such as those produced by American modernists Henry James, Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein, Irish authors such as James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, English writers such as D. H. Lawrence and E. M. Forster and Middle East or Palestinian authors such as Jabra Ibrahim Jabra and Mahmoud Darwish. The main topics covered in this course are: Loss, Alienation and Disorientation, Displacement and Gender Crossing, Displacement and Imperialistic Gesture, Displacement and Mobility, Displacement, Freedom and Self-fashioning, Acts of Departure: Roots and Routes, Home-Abroad Dichotomy, Displacement, Memory and the Narrative/Poetic Imagination, Displacement and Individual/ National Identity
432605	Transatlantic Studies	3
This course tracks the ways in which English and American authors ? among other European writers ? operated transatlantically in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Students will comparatively examine the influence of American authors in England as well as British authors in America in order to consider how the two saw and used each other as literary raw material. Such literary transactions took place against a changing geopolitical backdrop, from the years of British dominance, to the rise of what one might consider the American Empire, and the idea of the `Special Relationship?. The course looks into the work of such figures as Washington Irving, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Dion Boucicault, Henry James, the Imagists, and P.G.
432606	Women's Writing	3
This course examines feminist literary works from diverse cultural perspectives, focusing on representations of gender, power, and counter-discourses in literature. It introduces students to foundational feminist theory and encourages textual analysis within social and political contexts.
432607	Modern Arabic / English Literature in Translation	3
Major modern translated literary texts in the different genres between English and Arabic are undertaken from a comparative stand. Students examine the translated works and highlight the exchange of ideas, forms and influences. Students may also examine the reception of translated works in the target culture and the motivations that prompted the translation. The domain of translated literature provides a ground for comparative analytical research among the translated works. The translation process and techniques are not part of the concern of this course unless the lead to some thematic concerns and biases.
432608	A Special Topic in Literature	3
The course is an in-depth examination of a selected topic in literary studies. Among possible topics are the following: a specific author or authors, literary movement produced in a specific time or place, historical period, genre, critical theory, creative writing, literary journalism; or an emerging interdisciplinary area such as digital humanities, literature and the other arts, or the graphic novel. Students will focus on a body of literature that, for example, addresses a common topic, represents particular subgenre, or represents a cultural identity. Readings will include a range of time periods, authors and perspectives on the chosen topic, which may also be examined comparatively in their cultural context as well as in other cultural contexts. The course can thus be cross-cultural in scope and, whenever possible, pay attention to works by female writers in a comparative cultural framework, too. Because this course helps students to focus on a certain topic of their interest, it provides them with the necessary knowledge to narrow down their research scope, specialize in a literary topic, and write in-depth dissertations.
432698	Comprehensive Exam	0

Speciality Optional Requirements Student must complete 12 credit hours

Course Code	Course Name	Credit Hours	Prerequests
423650	Theorizing Subjectivity and Power	3
432650	Theorizing Subjectivity and Power	3
This course explores the configurations of subjectivity, individuality and agency, following the deconstruction of the Cartesian subject or the thinking thing, through a range of English and Arabic literary texts from the 16th century to the present. Following postmodern theories of subjectivity unearthed by philosophers and literary critics such as Nietzsche, Althusser, Sartre, Butler, Derrida, Foucault, Descartes, Kant, Mansfield and Belsey, among others, the course examines the tensions between the mighty opposites of free will and determinism, reason and desire, subjectivity and subjugation, individuality and ideology and the technological and the human
432651	Travel Literature	3
This course engages students with the literature of travelers, particularly travelers who came to the Holy Land from Europe and the United States since the 18th century for religious, commerce, journalism or conquest, purposes. Their diaries, and different forms of narrative are examined from a colonial or post-colonial perspective. While reverse travels (from the East to the West) are not the focus of the course, students may pursue this dimension in their research by alluding to the literature of exile, expatriation and voluntary emigration. Among the prominent names of travel literature that may be examined are Mark Twain, Herman Melville, Sir Richard Burton, William Thackeray, Benjamin Disraeli, and Joseph Conrad, to name only few.
432652	Orientalism and Oriental Studies	3
This course explores representations of the East in Western literature from a postcolonial studies perspective. It discusses stereotypes and the historical relationship between East and West in literary discourse, analyzing novels and poems that highlight orientalist structures in writing.
432653	Romanticism in the Arab Context	3
The overwhelming Romantic culture of feeling and sensibility, its generous celebration of scientific progress and its deep-seated concerns about cultural and environmental decay as well as its persistent debates about gender and sexuality have influenced Arab writers and contributed to the making of Arab Romanticism whose contemporary cultural understandings also urge quick responses. This course examines the major tenets of European Romanticism and its influence on its Arab counterpart in the modern age. It gives students an advanced introduction to the major writings of the European and Arab Romanticisms. Whilst the course examines the conceptions of philosophical, socio-political and cultural formation developed in the literature of both movements and their relationship with modern discourses, it also explores genres which negotiate these conceptions, including philosophical texts, the novel and "romantic" modes of verse.
432654	Echoes of Postmodern Literature in the Arab World	3
The course examines the ways and means by which postmodern theorists charted and mapped the postmodern literary scene. It provides students with the opportunity to engage with the concerns and literary strategies of postmodern literature. A major portion of the course concentrates on postmodern approaches to history, hyper-reality, the body, popular culture, and the media. The course then takes a comparative edge by examining how Arab contemporary writers adopted, questioned, revised, or altered the primary tenets of postmodernity.
432655	Memory Studies	3
This course addresses the concept of memory in literature, including personal and collective memory, writing about the past, and narratives tied to identity and history. It reviews theories of memory and applies them to selected literary texts from various world literatures.
432656	World Literature	3
World Literature introduces students to representative works from Western and non-Western literary traditions of different historical periods. It aims at promoting critical thinking and the appreciation of diversity within a comparative frame of analysis. The choice of texts and writers is the prerogative of each instructor as long as cultural diversity and the comparative analysis are maintained. Through research in the different genres, students are asked to detect the network of relations that ties the different works of world literature.
432657	Comparative Drama	3
This course focuses on analyzing plays from various cultures through a comparative lens, exploring themes such as identity, power, and resistance as represented in dramatic texts. It examines how social and political contexts influence theatrical structures and styles, encouraging students to conduct applied comparative analyses between Arabic and Western plays.
432658	Hip Hop	3
Hip hop is generally linked with resistance to the standing social, economic and political wrongs. While hip hop is a western genre, it is adopted in different Arab countries. With the rise of the Arab Spring, hip hop gained momentum; it became more acceptable as a genre for the youth who are capable of causing change. Different Arabic and English hip hop forms such as rap, graffiti, break dances and spoken word performances are studied with reference to their sociopolitical realities. Themes, forms and influences of hip hop on culture are undertaken from a critical comparative stand. Since hip hop is a virgin subject, students are encouraged to establish a canon of hip hop in the Arab World.