Compare and contrast Wilfred Thesiger’s account of his Arabian expeditions to those written by T.E. Lawrence, Amin al-Rihani and Freya Stark. Base your analysis on the following questions:
a) What attracts them to the desert and how do they depict it in their writings?
b) What are their attitudes towards the Arab bedouin? How does the authors’ self-identification as “non-Bedouin” influence their relationships with them?
c) In light of the two articles by Edward Said that we’ve read in class, how do these travel accounts comply with or undermine Said’s “Orientalism” thesis?
The paper is due on Tuesday, April 15th by 5:00pm. Please send your paper to me via email (slieb@middlebury.edu) as a pdf file.