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- Civilisations. [Episode 5], Renaissances Think Renaissance and you think Italy. But in the 15th and 16th centuries the great Islamic empires experienced their own extraordinary cultural flowering. The two phenomena were acutely conscious of, and in competition with, each other and mutually open to influences flowing both ways. The fifth film in the Civilisations series goes east and west with Simon Schama: to Papal Rome but also to Ottoman Istanbul and Mughal Lahore and Agra, exploring those connections and rivalries.
- First civilizations. Cities View the birthplace of civilization: the Middle East, site of the world’s first villages, towns and cities, from the hills of Turkey to the plains of Iraq. They were crucibles of invention and innovation — turbo-charging the pace of progress.
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- Ethnographic Video Online, Volume I-II: Foundational Films This link opens in a new window Ethnographic Video Online, Vol. I-II: Foundational Films contains classic and contemporary ethnographies, documentaries and shorts from every continent, providing teachers visual support to introduce and contextualize hundreds of cultural groups and practices around the world.
Featured Resources
Tablet and Pen by
The countries that stretch along the broad horizons of the Middle East--from Morocco to Iran, from Turkey to Pakistan--boast different cultures, different languages, and different religions. Yet the literary landscape of this dynamic part of the world has been bound together not by borders and nationalities, but by a common experience of Western imperialism. Keenly aware of the collected scars left by a legacy of colonial rule, the acclaimed writer Reza Aslan, with a team of four regional editors and seventy-seven translators, cogently demonstrates with Tablet and Pen how literature can, in fact, be used to form identity and serve as an extraordinary chronicle of the disrupted histories of the region.Acting with Words Without Borders, which fosters international exchange through translation and publication of the world's finest literature, Aslan has purposefully situated this volume in the twentieth century, beyond the familiar confines of the Ottoman past, believing that the writers who have emerged in the last hundred years have not received their full due. This monumental collection, therefore, of nearly two hundred pieces, including short stories, novels, memoirs, essays and works of drama--many of them presented in English for the first time--features translated works from Arabic, Persian, Urdu, and Turkish. Organized chronologically, the volume spans a century of literature--from the famed Arab poet Khalil Gibran to the Nobel laureates Naguib Mahfouz and Orhan Pamuk, from the great Syrian-Lebanese poet Adonis to the grand dame of Urdu fiction, Ismat Chughtai--connected by the extraordinarily rich tradition of resplendent cultures that have been all too often ignored by the Western canon.By shifting America's perception of the Middle Eastern world away from religion and politics, Tablet and Pen evokes the splendors of a region through the voices of its writers and poets, whose literature tells an urgent and liberating story. With a wealth of contextual information that places the writing within the historical, political, and cultural breadth of the region, Tablet & Pen is transcendent, a book to be devoured as a single sustained narrative, from the first page to the last.
Location: Mugar Stacks PJ409 .T33 2011Publication Date: 2010
Literary Visions of the Middle East: an anthology of canonical masterpieces of Arabic, Persian, Turkish and Hebrew fiction (mid-19th to early 21st centuries) by
This anthology by Stephan Guth assembles, in English translation, more than fourty prose texts of modern Arabic, Turkish, Persian, and Hebrew fiction, from the 19th century reform period until the early 2000s. Each of them can be regarded as having attained canonical status - not only because they display "typical" stylistic features of the periods to which their respective national literary historiographies usually ascribe them ("Reformism," "Romanticism," Socially criticial Realism," etc.), but also because they mirror, in an exemplary manner, the political and social situations in their countries at the times they were written. As unfiltered comments by Middle Easterners who lived through decisive phases of their societies' development and experienced the ups and downs of their peoples' histories, the voices that speak from this collection have the quality of representative sources that grant us immediate insight into Middle Eastern lifeworlds. They make us relive the conflicts, dreams, traumata, desires and emotions of Arab, Turkish, Iranian and Israeli society at certain points in history and give us access to the worldviews and creative imagination with which authors meet and process the changes and challenges they register. The introductory paragraphs preceding each text provide background knowledge and the "red thread," their ensemble combining to a literary history of the Middle East in a nutshell.
Location: Mugar Stacks PJ409 .L58 2019Publication Date: 2019
The Other Middle East: An Anthology of Modern Levantine Literature by
This unique literary collection offers a window on the contemporary Levant, a region comprising most of Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Palestine, Israel, Cyprus, parts of southern Turkey and northwestern Iraq, and the Sinai Peninsula. Originally written in Arabic, French, Aramaic, Lebanese, Egyptian, and Hebrew, and reflecting an extraordinary diversity of cultures, faiths, traditions, and languages, the selections in this book also convey a wide range of ideas and perspectives, to offer readers a nuanced understanding of the mosaic that is the contemporary Middle East. Franck Salameh, who compiled this anthology over the course of more than two decades, introduces and annotates each selection for the benefit of the uninitiated reader, offering background on the various peoples and politics of the Levant. In these pages, we discover a Middle East in which, as one writer puts it, "an Armenian and a Turk can still hold hands in the midst of massacres."]]>
Location: OnlinePublication Date: 2018
Classical Arabic Literature by
A major achievement in the field of translation, this anthology presents a rich assortment of classical Arabic poems and literary prose, from pre-Islamic times until the 18th century, with short introductions to guide non-specialist students and informative endnotes and bibliography for advanced scholars. Like many pre-modern Arabic anthologies it aims at being both entertaining and informative. It ranges from the early Bedouin poems with their evocation of desert life to refined urban lyrical verse, from tender love poetry to sonorous eulogy or vicious lampoons, and from the heights of mystical rapture to the frivolity of comic verse. The prose contains anecdotes, entertaining or edifying tales and parables, a fairy-tale, a bawdy story, samples of literary criticism, and much more. With this anthology, distinguished Arabist Geert Jan van Gelder brings together well-known texts as well as less familiar pieces that will be new even to scholars in the field. Many recent studies and anthologies of Middle Eastern literatures are primarily interested in Islam and religious matters--an emphasis that leads to the common misconception that almost everything in the region was and is dominated by religion. Classical Arabic Literature instead brings to life the rich variety of pre-modern Arabic social and cultural life, where secular texts happily coexisted with religious ones. This masterful anthology, in English only, will introduce this vibrant literary heritage to a wide spectrum of new readers.
Location: OnlinePublication Date: 2012
Librarian
Barbara Maratos
Contact:
Boston University Libraries
bkmarato@bu.edu
bkmarato@bu.edu
Subjects: Language & Linguistics, Literature