This course opens up avenues for exploring the nexus between conflict and memory in the Arab world. We will explore the often silenced memory narratives of Arab writers caught in the flux of upheaval for more than a century. How do Arab writers and artists engage and/or create memory narratives in times of war? How does fiction recreate, revise and re-examine the past? How do our human memories and imaginations give rise to the stories we tell and to the selves that we are becoming? In this course we consider the nature of memory and its relationship to imagination, both in the evolving life of the individual and in the development of the larger group or culture. This course will address these questions by tracing the interconnections between memory and literature through close readings of memoirs, novels, poems, short stories, films and graphic art.