Graduate Studies

MPhil in European Literature & Culture | Course content | Modules | SP Translation

MPhil in European Literature & Culture

Spanish | SP Translation

Al-Andalus and Hispania/España: Translation and Tolerance
(Convenor: Dr Louise Haywood)

We shall discuss two primary tropes in terms of which al-Andalus and España are construed as phenomena: translatio and tolerance. Other (cognate) tropes are adduced to account for them, chief among them being influence and transmission, whose study is often characterized by a circularity of reading and reasoning. We propose to consider the imbrication of these tropes and practices which characterizes the current study of the literary heritage of al-Andalus and España in our respective disciplines.

Menocal’s interventions (1987, 2002, 2004, and 2008 with Dodds and Krasner Balbale) outline an overarching set of concerns in discussions of medieval Iberia, particularly attacking Orientalism and Medievalism (for want of better terms), or rather, dealing with how the Muslim presence in the Iberian peninsula has been studied, and marginalized, by Arabists, Hebraists and Medievalists. In hindsight, Menocal’s arguments have been rarely contested by those who have read them, and more generally ignored, and her pleas for disciplinary recalibration have not been heeded: it is still the norm for Muslim al-Andalus and medieval España to be studied, researched and taught severally and not jointly. We aim to address such issues in the first seminar, and hope to move beyond them in the seminars, offering a menu of seven.

Opening Session: ‘The Ornament of the World’: Muslim Spain or al-Andalus?

Students may select five of the following sessions:
1. Translatio, 1: Philosophical and Scientific Texts (translation movements and schools);
2. Translatio, 2: Religious Belief, Allegory, and Anxiety (Kalila wa Dimna/Calila y Dimna and Muhammad’s Ladder);
3. Law and Definition (Alfonso X, ‘the Learned’, Primer partida, títulos 1 and 2; Ibn Khaldun Muqaddimah (esp. introduction);
4. Varieties of Narrativity (Juan Ruiz, Libro de Buen Amor; maqama, risala and adab) 5. Lyric, 1: Courtly Love and the ‘Circularité du Chant’ (the emergence of European love lyric and the ghazal);
6. Lyric, 2: The Kharja and the Absurdity of Disciplinarity (the kharja debate and the problems it raises for disciplinarity);
7. Chaos of Disciplines or Scenes of Inquiry (paradigms of study of cultural interaction and disciplinary practice)

Bibliography
Americo Castro, España en su historia: cristianos, moros, judíos (Buenos Aires, 1948); rev. trans. The Structure of Spanish History, trans. Edmund L. King (Princeton, 1954; also under different title, 1971; see Tolan on history).
Jerrilynn D. Dodds, María Rosa Menocal, and Abigail Krasner Balbale, The Arts of Intimacy. Christians, Jews and Muslims in the Making of Castilian Culture (New Haven and London, 2008).
Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction, 2nd edn (London, 2007).
Thomas F. Glick, ‘Introduction’, Islamic and Christian Spain in the Early Middle Ages (Princeton, 1979), pp. 3-15; available as an e-book: http://libro.uca.edu/ics/intro.htm.
Salma Khadra Jayyusi (ed.), The Legacy of Muslim Spain (Leiden, 1994);
María Rosa Menocal, The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History: A Forgotten Heritage (Philadelphia, 2004 [1987]), pp. 155-160 (‘Afterword’)
María Rosa Menocal, ‘Al-Andalus and 1492: The Ways of Remembering,’ in: Salma Khadra Jayyusi (ed.), The Legacy of Muslim Spain, 1 (Leiden, 1994), pp. 483-504.
María Rosa Menocal, The Ornament of the World. How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain (New York and Boston, 2002).
María Rosa Menocal, ‘Visions of al-Andalus,’ in: María Rosa Menocal, Raymond P. Scheindlin and Michael Sells (eds), The Cambridge History of Arabic Literature: The Literature of al-Andalus (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 1-24.
Edward Said, ‘Andalusia’s Journey’, travel + leisure (December 2002) http://www.travelandleisure.com/articles/andalusias-journey.
Claudio Sánchez Albornoz, España: un enigma (Buenos Aires, 1956).
Cynthia Robinson and Leyla Rouhi (eds.), Under the Influence: Questioning the Comparative in Medieval Castile (Leiden, 2005).

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