Davis, Natalie Zemon. Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth-Century Muslim Between Worlds. New York: Hill & Wang, 2006. One of the most famous Shakespearean plays is Othello, but few people today are aware of the figure who inspired the central character or how any early European modern authors gained knowledge of the Muslim world.[footnoteRef:1] In her book Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth-Century Muslim between Worlds. Natalie Zemon Davis chronicles the life of Yuhanna al-Asad al-Gharnati (also known as Ioannes Leo Africanus), who wrote a series of volumes designed to introduce the Christian reader to the Muslim way of life. His works were to become seminal texts in defining how Europeans saw the Muslim world as well as Jews and Semitic persons deemed to be 'other.' The author was a Muslim who converted to Christianity after being captured and enslaved and wrote his text under the auspices of Pope Leo X, who was fascinated by Semitic languages and Muslim customs, partially because he had a desire to make his mark converting these peoples.[footnoteRef:2] [1: Eleazar Gutwirth, review of Natalie Zemon Davis, Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth-Century Muslim Between Worlds. The Journal...
2 (April 2007), p. 310.] [2: Natalie Zemon Davis, Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth-Century Muslim Between Worlds. (New York: Hill & Wang, 2006), p.65.]
O Brother, Where Art Thou? Homer in Hollywood: The Coen Brothers' O Brother, Where Art Thou? Could a Hollywood filmmaker adapt Homer's Odyssey for the screen in the same way that James Joyce did for the Modernist novel? The idea of a high-art film adaptation of the Odyssey is actually at the center of the plot of Jean-Luc Godard's 1963 film Contempt, and the Alberto Moravia novel on which Godard's film is
He is a full grown hero who only needs a goal to set him on his journey. Gilgamesh is young and inexperienced, and he needs help to grow and mature throughout his journey, which he obtains from his dear friend Enkidu. Gilgamesh has many lessons to learn, and Odysseus learns too, but he is farther on the road to maturity, and so his journey leads him somewhere he already
Creoles Professionals involved in therapy and counseling with members of the Creole culture of New Orleans and southern Louisiana should be aware of the history and traditions of this group that make it distinctive from all others in the United States, and indeed from the French-speaking Cajun communities in the same region. In Louisiana, Creoles are not simply the white descendants of the early French and Spanish colonists, although in the
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Slave Narrative and Black Autobiography - Richard Wright's "Black Boy" and James Weldon Johnson's Autobiography The slave narrative maintains a unique station in modern literature. Unlike any other body of literature, it provides us with a first-hand account of institutional racially-motivated human bondage in an ostensibly democratic society. As a reflection on the author, these narratives were the first expression of humanity by a group of people in a society where
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