Seminars

The early rhetorical treatises, as testing grounds for emerging aesthetic concepts, are deeply tied to specific socio-cultural contexts and influence readers’ literary preferences. They invite reflection on the evolution of balāgha (Muslim eloquence) during the Arabic-Islamic classical period, particularly in response to the profound influence of urbanization on literature. This talk, while providing an overview of 9th-century Baghdad’s cultural growth, explores how historical moments of urban development linked to cultural enlightenment could have inspired some authors to develop a new approach to literary writing as the study of the 9th-century rhetorical treatise Kitāb al-tashbīhāt by Ibn Abī ʿAwn (d. 322/934) shows. This innovative approach enabled the Abbasid authors to explore, analyze, and employ their own languages and literary traditions as powerful tools and reflect on new literary styles, models, and perspectives whilst harmonizing a secular, progress-driven mentality with more unorthodox forms of critical thinking.

This talk examines the role of mimesis in classical Arabic anecdotal literature, arguing that stories classified as adab (edifying literature) in classical Arabic sources engaged with reality through analogy rather than strict representation. Drawing on statements from adab authors about their storytelling strategies, I explore how this analogical approach shaped the writing and reading of these narratives. Key topics include fictionality, story length and structure, and character representation. By highlighting the artistry of comparison over representation, this talk offers new tools for interpreting classical Arabic anecdotal literature.

In the nineteenth century, French orientalists began to refer to a work of the Mamluk scholar al-Maqrizi as “Le traité des famines”. Maqrizi’s text, Ighāthat al-umma bi kashf al-ghumma, written in 1405, was not a treatise on famine but a study of the causes of monetary crisis. In fact, famine may have been virtually unknown in medieval and early modern Egypt. But from the nineteenth century, European scholars, engineers, and colonial administrators began to portray Egypt as a place of great ecological precarity, utterly dependent on the Nile inundation and subject to the occurrence of devastating floods and episodic famines. This view misunderstood how Egyptians used the Nile, a misunderstanding that persists in most scholarship today. But the idea of precarity helped to justify a re-engineering of the Nile valley and the ecocide of the river.

How do the literatures and cultures of oppressed societies survive and flourish in spite of the overdetermining conditions of precarity and injustice of which they are a product and against which they protest? Might the symptom of oppression become simultaneously the agent of its critique? Melancholy Acts offers richly nuanced reflections on these questions through a series of wide-ranging engagements with Arab thought, literature, and film in the aftermath of the 1948 dispossession of Palestinians and the 1967 military defeat of Arab armies.

This article is an attempt to come to terms with the conceptualization of key words that have become central to intellectual dialogue. Among these are ‘revolution,’ ‘people,’ ‘leader,’ and ‘self-immolation.’ The latter is still alive in people’s minds, though the media overlooks it whenever its rejectionist message is not condoned. Nevertheless, this article takes the Tunisian fruit vendor’s act of December 2010, as an important rejectionist act that touched a chord among the disadvantaged and the repressed and led to the eruption of a large grassroots movement. Intellectuals, and the new generation of writers in the Arab world and worldwide, were as surprised as others by that volcanic eruption that brought to the discussion the comments made by Marx, Engels, Sartre, and later Rancière, along with the Moroccan thinker and historian Abdallah Laroui. The consensus among different segments of the intelligentsia is a recognition of the inevitability, not only of the post‒May1968 revisionist politics, but also and more importantly the imperative of recognizing people as capable of leadership, regardless of their academic grounding or its absence, class, caste, or gender. New modes and semiotic icons are emerging, and along with them new challenges which corporate capital and its media try hard to camouflage or debunk.

Inspired by the Arabian Nights, Irene Lozano’s novel One Thousand Days and One Day is currently a work in progress. The novel brings some aspects of the main story of Scheherezade and King Shahriar into our contemporary times. Sherezade is probably the best-known storyteller of our times, but she never told her story. Through her perspective, the main story of The Nights will become a very different story, a psychological thriller where both the main characters are no longer archetypes and we get to know what they think, feel, and go through.

Every writer leaves unwritten books. What is curious in the case of Edward Said is how comparatively little he wrote on Palestinian literature. His final work Late Style was expected to include a chapter on Mahmoud Darwish, but after his death his editors found no draft or notes for the Darwish chapter. In this talk I will consider this curious but perhaps symptomatic absence to suggest that Late Style can itself be read as offering a theoretical model for Palestinian literature.

This paper is part of a broader study of medical hermeneutics in classical Arabic. It focuses on ideas on authorship and authority among physicians writing in Arabic between the 9th and 13th centuries AD. Particularly, the paper explores the tension between perceptions of Hippocrates as authoritative, and a medical hermeneutics aiming to establish and understand the realities of human health and disease. Arabic physician-commentators considered Hippocrates’ works as medically accurate and worthy of commentary, yet they regularly encountered a Hippocratic text that did not correspond to their understanding of the medical world. This posed an exegetical challenge, as commentators aimed to interpret the Hippocratic text in ways that acknowledged its medical value, yet were philological sound and grounded in contemporary standards of medical rational empiricism. To complicate their task further, commentators upheld strict conventions of politeness in the genre of the sharḥ, which denounced direct criticism of the author. This led them to devise interpretive strategies which allowed them to preserve both their standing as grammarians and the reputation of Hippocrates, while communicating their own medical understandings as physicians.

There are crucial moments and turning points resulting from the progression of events that indelibly mark the texture of any artistic expression. These turning points are usually situated in the crevices of personal and shared history and in the significant traumas and watersheds that inevitably mark a “before” and an “after”. In these crevices, trauma becomes a source of inspiration that interrupts the continuity of daily life, thus causing disruptions that are expressed in literary works by artists who are trauma survivors themselves. The Nakba (1948) is undoubtedly the trauma par excellence for Palestine, with far-reaching repercussions for the entire Arab world: It is a symbolic burden from which generations of writers continue to draw inspiration, today as yesterday. Whilst the Nakba continues to be a source of inspiration for Palestinian literature, it seems that this trauma has prevented Palestinian authors from looking to the future. In fact, futuristic visions that variously run through the texture of Arabic science fiction (al-khayal al-‘ilmi) do not seem to find proper fulfillment in Palestinian fiction. “It is a luxury, to which Palestinians haven’t felt they can afford to escape” –Basma Ghalayini maintains in her foreword to Palestine + 100. What is generated in literature when, faced with the impossibility of adapting to real life, other – and often upside-down – worlds are portrayed to contest reality? How should we classify literary works that, in turning the world upside-down or imagining different, futuristic ones, produce dystopic scenarios? The contribution aims to shed light on narrative routes that seek to answer these questions.

The Worlding of Arabic Literature: Language, Affect, and the Ethics of Translatability (Fordham University Press, 2023) explores the aesthetics, ethics, and politics of Arabic literature’s emergence as world literature in the contemporary era. Through case studies of English translations of Arabic literary works published since the 19th century, the book refutes assumptions of Arabic literature’s essential untranslatability or incommensurability to Anglophone modes of aesthetic expression. It argues that a practice of embodied translation attuned to the affects of linguistic form, phonetics, grammar, and orthography—insofar as these function aesthetically within the Arabic text—is capable of transmitting the text’s literariness to an Anglophone audience by engaging readers’ own bodies with the irreducibly material aesthetics of the source language. In a global Anglophone literary field that has long disavowed both the literariness of Arabic literature and its capacity for worldliness, such a translation practice constitutes an ethical intervention into how Arabic literature circulates and is read today.