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]

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]

Syllabus for ENGL 479P: BookLab, an upper-division undergraduate course at the University of Maryland. Taught with the resources and facilities of the Department of English’s BookLab, the course is a historical, imaginative, and experiential introduction to the multitudinous forms of what is not the oldest but is surely among the most enduring of…[Read more]

I can’t seem to forget the anecdotic episode that one of my Literature Professors used to tell the class: a deconstructionist acquaintance of theirs was so absorbed in their literal undertaking that their meals consisted only of letter-noodles soup, so that even the most mundane of tasks could intertwine itself with textuality. Farfetched as this…[Read more]

“Where do we find ourselves?” are Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Experience” first words. The query is the author’s starting point for a number of philosophical considerations; it’s also the point of departure for our making sense of pain, through the reading of both Emerson’s essay and James Joyce’s Ulysses.
The essay hipothesises that Joyce’s “We walk…[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]

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]

This essay begins with my attempt to close-read a text by a recently departed colleague, Jeffrey B. Ferguson, but turns into an exploration of writing across registers, in this case the delivery of a very different version of the same paper by Ferguson, one that is far more intimate, insightful, and moving.

This essay begins with my attempt to close-read a text by a recently departed colleague, Jeffrey B. Ferguson, but turns into an exploration of writing across registers, in this case the delivery of a very different version of the same paper by Ferguson, one that is far more intimate, insightful, and moving.

Two-thirds of the way through Faulkner, Mississippi, his extended meditation on the prose oeuvre of the American writer William Faulkner, Édouard Glissant remarks on Faulkner’s famous ‘amused refusal to “correct the contradictions”’ introduced into his texts through his constant revisiting of characters across novels not necessarily set in proper…[Read more]

Two-thirds of the way through Faulkner, Mississippi, his extended meditation on the prose oeuvre of the American writer William Faulkner, Édouard Glissant remarks on Faulkner’s famous ‘amused refusal to “correct the contradictions”’ introduced into his texts through his constant revisiting of characters across novels not necessarily set in proper…[Read more]