Notes: Course Repeatable for Credit. Narrating the Modern Mediterranean: What is the Mediterranean and to whom does it belong? Is it a porous seascape, a bordered paradox touching three continents and an ocean, or an idea open to invention and reinvention? It has captured the imagination of writers, thinkers, artists, and travelers for centuries, but the study of this zone is often overdetermined by the borders of its northern shores. What Mediterranean emerges when it is narrated from its southern or eastern coasts or by its Othered denizens, passing visitors, and theorists from other worldly shores? This course studies major and minor cultural productions--ranging from film, poetry, novels, documentary, and memoir--to understand how the Mediterranean of the 20th century onward is imagined and fantasized into being, remembered, mourned, forgotten, and/or wilfully disavowed. We will first study writings on Mediterranean humanism by Albert Camus, Taha Hussein, Franco Cassano, and Amin Maalouf. Then, reading excerpts of foundational texts from ancient Greece and Rome and medieval al-Andalus alongside works by modern authors such as Nouri al-Jarrah, Assia Djebar, and Radwa Ashour, we will see how central themes like travel, hospitality, and conquest are revisited to narrate recent and on-going realities of colonization, partition, war, and migration across the Mediterranean. Finally, we will explore the concept of cosmopolitanism across cities like Marseille, Alexandria, Istanbul, and Rome and the rise and policing of bordered space around and across the sea.