COMP 324
The Orientalist Sublime and the Politics of Horror Fall 2013
Division I Exploring Diversity Initiative
Cross-listed ENGL 334
This is not the current course catalog

How do we name those things that are beyond the grasp of reason, outside the realm of intelligibility? How do we attempt to domesticate that which is foreign or other? What, to Western Europeans, is the deep mysterious Orient but a new instance of the sublime? This course will take up the inheritance of the eighteenth-century fad in Europe for all things Oriental that followed the translation of The Arabian Nights into French in 1707. We will read the Nights alongside Edmund Burke’s theory of the sublime and writings on the French Revolution in order to frame an investigation of the relationship between the real politics of Empire and the politics of imperial representation. In aiming to reveal how literary and visual texts deal with the magisterial, the infinite, the unmapped, and the mystery of the Sublime East, we will touch on important writers and artists in the long history and aftermath of European Orientalism from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, including J.A.D. Ingres, Eugène Delacroix, Goethe, Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, Wilkie Collins, Bram Stoker, E.M. Forster, Jorge Luis Borges, and Salman Rushdie. As we mine the texts and practices of Orientalism for historical and aesthetic lessons about how imagination works to conceive the other, we will also reckon with contemporary discourses of cultural difference and in so doing, contribute to the College’s Exploring Diversity Initiative.