Offered through the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Languages and Literatures (AMEL) and the Comparative Literature Program. This course is an introduction to Arabo-Islamic culture through its most accessible and popular exponent, The Thousand and One Nights. The course will take this masterpiece of world literature as the focal point for a multidisciplinary literary study. It will cover the genesis of the text from Indian and Mediterranean antecedents, its Arabic recensions, its reception in the West, and its influence on European literature. The course will examine leading stories from the corpus of The Nights in translation. Analyses of the stories themselves will draw on the rich body of critical literature dealing with The Nights. The course will be taught in English in its entirety. No prerequisites. Dist: INTL or LIT; WCult; NW. KADHIM.