(Offered in English).This survey course examines representative fiction and non-fiction texts, painting, films, operas, comics and video games to explore salient incidences of encounter, impact, and reception of the Arabs in medieval and modern Western thought. Examples of topics of analysis are Islamic imagery in Dante’s Inferno, motifs of storytelling and narrative structures from the One Thousand and One night in Boccaccio’s Decameron and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales…From the Moors in Spain, to the Arabs in Sicily, from Shakespeare’s Othello to the Victorian Gothic Vathek, the course will move on to explore the extension of the French Orientalists’ influence beyond European painting to operas, and later in cinema, exploring works such as Il Seraglio, Lawrence Arabia, Casablanca and others. Current representations of the Arabs in Western films, TV shows, comics, and video games will be analyzed to trace continuity and discontinuity of the earlier reception. Students who take this course to be counted towards the Language Citation must complete written course work in Arabic.