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]

This review essay approaches Ranjan Ghosh and J. Hillis Miller’s Thinking Literature across Continents (2016) from a set of questions about what it means to read in the age of hyperarchival accumulation. Written against the background of events in the United States and elsewhere during the fall of 2017, the essay tracks and assesses Ghosh and…[Read more]

This article covers an entire generation of American popular novels published between the Civil War and World War I: campus fictions, focusing all but exclusively on homosocial scenes of undergraduate merriment. Centering on the camaraderie of fraternal sociality, campus novels model friendship as a democratic ideal for dispensing with conflict,…[Read more]

“Focus on ‘Henry V'” is a peer-reviewed, multimedia, digital Open Educational Resource co-authored and co-produced by faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates on the innovative digital publishing platform Scalar. Chapters include guides to early printed editions, sources, and performance and cinematic histories of the play, as well as…[Read more]

This paper examines cosmopolitanism in Teju Cole’s Every Day is for the Thief (2007) and Open City (2011). The protagonists of both novels maintain cosmopolitan identities largely by embracing an international literary culture in which elite cosmopolitan fiction relays the experiences of marginalized cosmopolitan subjects, such as the migrant w…[Read more]

Colonialism waned in the 1940s through 60s amidst decolonization movements, yet globalization flourished in often unnoticed, hegemonic pathways. Considering cultural products of this moment leads us to ask what happens in the age of globalization that follows after an age of nationalism. When capital migrates, and labour follows, whence culture?…[Read more]

Colonialism waned in the 1940s through 60s amidst decolonization movements, yet globalization flourished in often unnoticed, hegemonic pathways. Considering cultural products of this moment leads us to ask what happens in the age of globalization that follows after an age of nationalism. When capital migrates, and labour follows, whence culture?…[Read more]

The recent popularity of the film version of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings has renewed interest in this widely read work set in the realm of Middle-earth. A careful study of Tolkien’s work can be used to raise several philosophical questions, particularly in the area of ethics. This course will examine such questions, also considering topics fro…[Read more]

The recent popularity of the film version of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings has renewed interest in this widely read work set in the realm of Middle-earth. A careful study of Tolkien’s work can be used to raise several philosophical questions, particularly in the area of ethics. This course will examine such questions, also considering topics fro…[Read more]

The recent surge of interest in Afrofuturism has resulted in some groundbreaking work looking at the ways technology and race intersect in film, fashion, music and literature, as is evidenced by the important collection of essays “Afrofuturism 2.0” (2016), edited by Reynaldo Anderson and Charles E. Jones. However there has not yet been an aca…[Read more]

The recent surge of interest in Afrofuturism has resulted in some groundbreaking work looking at the ways technology and race intersect in film, fashion, music and literature, as is evidenced by the important collection of essays “Afrofuturism 2.0” (2016), edited by Reynaldo Anderson and Charles E. Jones. However there has not yet been an aca…[Read more]

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]