As a work that survives and appears in more than one form, King Lear has a vexing problem of interpretation and a rich opportunity for the study of textual and cultural variants. The play begins with an aging monarch staging a fantastical, paradoxical final act as a king. It lures us toward a final act of interpretation to nail down the nature of…[Read more]

Abstract.
In this paper, I read Leı ¨la Sebbar’s staging in her novel She´razzed: 17 ans,brune, frise´ e, les yeux verts of the resistance by children of North African and other immigrants in the early 1980s to the French state’s cartographic modes and documentsof control. The paper will consider the many uses to which the map was put by theFren…[Read more]

Abstract
This paper argues that Ahlām Mustaghānamī’s novel Dhākirat al-jasad (Memories of the Flesh) enacts a break with Algeria’s Francophone literary past, multiply staging its affiliation with the Arabic language. e novel positions itself as part of an Algerian linguistic drama that, once translated into French as Mémoires de la chair , is p…[Read more]

Published in Cairo in 1892, the first issue of Jurji Zaydan’s Arabic journal al-Hilal contained a history of the Arabic press, including a list of the journals published in Beirut in the 1870s and 1880s, when Zaydan was a young waiter and finally a Syrian Protestant College medical student and leader of the 1882 protest. Listed too are the Arabi…[Read more]

ABSTRACT Theorizations of the female subject in Arabic literary criticism have long charted debates within Western feminism. This chapter invites a reading of Hanan al-Shaykh’s novel The Story of Zahra that would attend rather to the quiet narrative aporia surrounding a reticent Zahra, the challenge her will to be “look[ed] at [as] a woman in…[Read more]

ABSTRACT Serialized over the course of 1905 in the Arabic journal al-Muqtaṭaf, Ya‘qūb Ṣarrūf’s novel Fatāt Mişr [The Girl of Egypt] was avidly read by contemporary subscribers and then soon forgotten by Arabic’s reading public. Ṣarrūf came to despise Fatāt Mişr and all of his novels, finding that the market for the genre in Arabic fell far sh…[Read more]

ABSTRACT This paper reads narrative published in the journals of 1870s Beirut in the context of an emerging bourgeois readership and argues that the significance of this archive to modern Arabic fiction has been neglected by critics. Taking the intensification of the silk trade with France following the civil war of 1860 as a point of historical…[Read more]

ABSTRACT Cultural cold war played out in Arabic from the late 1950s into the early 1970s in the
conference halls, hotel lobbies, cafes, bars, magazine offices, publishing houses, kiosks,
and streets of Beirut and Cairo. Berlin, Paris, Tashkent, Khartoum, London, Baghdad1,
and Tunis all have their place in this built landscape of cultural cold…[Read more]

Abstract
In 1950, the United States Central Intelligence Agency created the Congress for Cultural Freedom,
with its main offices in Paris. The CCF was designed as a cultural front in the Cold War in
response to the Soviet Cominform, and founded and fiinded a worldwide network of literary
journals (as well as conferences, concerts, art exhibits…[Read more]

ABSTRACT

Extensively quoting from the archives of the International Association for Cultural Freedom, a Cold War organization founded as a CIA front in 1950, this chapter provides a history for their Arabic literary activities, including the journals Aṣwāt, Adab, and their best known work in the region: Ḥiwār (1962–67), edited by Palesti…[Read more]

Christa Winsloe’s Mädchen in Uniform texts offer a means to examine the role of education in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German society while also exemplifying the genre of boarding school literature. This article provides an overview of educational debates in Prussia and the German Empire in the second half of the nineteenth ce…[Read more]

The travels and writings of Octavio Paz and Severo Sarduy in India.

The reception of Jesuit priests at the the court of Akbar the Mughal emperor of India

A series of derivative verses from the late-third century has pride of place in one of the foundational collections of Chinese poetry. These verses, “Filling out the Missing Odes” by Shu Xi, can be found at the beginning of the lyric-poetry (shi 詩) section of the Wenxuan. This essay seeks to understand why such blatantly imitative pieces may have…[Read more]

Asian directors leverage Shakespeare’s own propensity to undermine dominant ideologies of gender—notably through the Ophelia figure—in their effort to renew Asian performance traditions. How do Shakespeare and modern directors talk to each other across cultural and historical divides? How does Ophelia become “unbound” through supraling…[Read more]

A syllabus for an undergraduate course, taught in English, on the visual culture (primarily film, photography, and aesthetic theory) of the Weimar Republic. The course is housed in German Studies and crosslisted with Art History, Cinema, and other departments.

Introduction to “Digital Methods and Traditional Chinese Literary Studies,” a special issue of the Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture.

This article combines qualitative and quantitative methods to rethink the literary history of late medieval China (830–960 CE). It begins with an overview of exchange poetry in the Tang dynasty and its role in the construction of the poetic subject, namely, the poetic subject’s distributed textual body. A total of 10,869 poems exchanged between 2…[Read more]

We are inviting proposals for the forthcoming “Re-membering Hospitality in the Mediterranean” International Conference that will be held on March 26-27, 2020 in Toulouse, France (Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès).
Abstracts (300 words) are due by September 15, 2019 to yasser elhariry (yasser.elhariry@dartmouth.edu), Isabelle Keller-Privat (isa.…[Read more]

Slides from Renata Kobetts Miller’s (City College of New York) presentation as part of the panel on “The Problems and Possibilities of Parenting in the Academy.”