Specters of World Literature最新文献

A Genealogy of Adab in the Comparative Middle East 比较中东亚达人家谱

Specters of World Literature Pub Date : 2020-08-01 DOI: 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474467032.003.0003

Karim Mattar

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引用次数: 0

Islam and the Limits of Translation: Orhan Pamuk and the Ottoman Revival 伊斯兰教与翻译的极限:奥尔罕·帕慕克与奥斯曼复兴

Specters of World Literature Pub Date : 2020-08-01 DOI: 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474467032.003.0005

Karim Mattar

{"title":"Islam and the Limits of Translation: Orhan Pamuk and the Ottoman Revival","authors":"Karim Mattar","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474467032.003.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474467032.003.0005","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter addresses the carefully (self-)cultivated image of Orhan Pamuk as a worldly, cosmopolitan, and secular-liberal writer. This image, I argue, has come to define the aesthetics and politics, the ethos, of his novels in their worldly reception, and has functioned to undermine the nature and extent of his engagement with the local (especially his native city, Istanbul, and its Ottoman, Islamic heritage). I trace this argument through a sustained focus on The Black Book as this novel has been translated and read in Britain and the United States. Drawing on translation theory, I show that both English versions of the novel are unable to capture the logic and significance of Pamuk’s culturally-specific use of language, and have influenced its Anglo-American (mis)reading as a postmodernist work. In my counter-reading, I argue that anything but a postmodernist deconstruction of myths of national and religious identity, The Black Book in fact comprises an evocation of Istanbul’s Ottoman, Islamic heritage in the face of a Turkish secular modernity by which this heritage was historically repressed. I detail this argument through close attention to Pamuk’s treatment of Sufism and Hurufism. The Black Book, I conclude, inscribes what I call “cultural neo-Ottomanism” as form.","PeriodicalId":125419,"journal":{"name":"Specters of World Literature","volume":"2 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132066613","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Towards a Spectral Theory of World Literature 世界文学的光谱理论

Specters of World Literature Pub Date : 2020-08-01 DOI: 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474467032.003.0001

Karim Mattar

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引用次数: 0

The Revolution of Form: Naguib Mahfouz from the Suez Crisis to the Arab Spring 形式的革命:从苏伊士危机到阿拉伯之春的纳吉布·马哈福兹

Specters of World Literature Pub Date : 2020-08-01 DOI: 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474467032.003.0004

Karim Mattar

{"title":"The Revolution of Form: Naguib Mahfouz from the Suez Crisis to the Arab Spring","authors":"Karim Mattar","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474467032.003.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474467032.003.0004","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter considers how Naguib Mahfouz has been co-opted in global and in national literary cultures alike. I argue that while the Swedish Academy’s decision to award Mahfouz the Nobel Prize in 1988 was based on universalist principles that obscure what I regard as his more local aesthetic and formal sensibilities, his subsequent recognition by the Egyptian state as a national writer similarly obscures his lifelong critique of that same state for its authoritarianism, corruption, and political violence. Against these co-optations, I aim to restore Mahfouz’s significance for world literature. I do so by considering the novels of his late, indigenous / traditional phase. In Arabian Nights and Days, Mahfouz draws on the frame narrative, folklorish elements, and magical devices of the 1,001 Nights in order to reinvent the novel as a world literary form. In Morning and Evening Talk, he adopts and adapts the classical Arabic genre of the ṭabaqāt in order to reinterpret the 200-year trajectory of modernity in the country from the perspective of its political, social, cultural, and economic margins. Mahfouz’s “revolution of form”, I conclude, enacts a deeply rooted, organic, and historically conscious form of revolution against the abuses of (Egyptian) modernity.","PeriodicalId":125419,"journal":{"name":"Specters of World Literature","volume":"97 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132653503","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Futures of Spectrality 频谱的未来

Specters of World Literature Pub Date : 2020-08-01 DOI: 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474467032.003.0007

Karim Mattar

引用次数: 0

The Shabaḥ of Modernity: World-Systems, the Petro-Imperium, and the Indigenous Trace 现代性的沙巴达:世界体系、石油帝国和本土痕迹

Specters of World Literature Pub Date : 2020-08-01 DOI: 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474467032.003.0002

Karim Mattar

{"title":"The Shabaḥ of Modernity: World-Systems, the Petro-Imperium, and the Indigenous Trace","authors":"Karim Mattar","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474467032.003.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474467032.003.0002","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter provides a new reading of Abdelrahman Munif’s five-volume epic of Gulf petro-modernity, Cities of Salt, in the context of the world literature debate. Considering how this novel has been framed for international audiences since its translation into English, I start with John Updike’s response to Munif as “insufficiently Westernized” to have produced a novel. This response, I argue, is symptomatic of a world literature that conceives of “the literary” only according to “Western” norms and models. I then offer a corrective based on what I show to be Munif’s spectral characterization of Bedouin resistance leader Miteb al-Hathal. A “shabaḥ” (specter), this figure hovers at the interstices of modern oil state that had overwritten or incorporated his world, and, unassimilable, haunts it – indeed, the novel – with the revolutionary memory of its own abuses. Drawing on a wide range of primary and secondary sources, I trace Munif’s spectral inf(l)ection of novelistic form through a discussion of questions of indigeneity; Bedouin oral poetic tradition; and the dialectics of Gulf “petro-modernity” in relation to Bedouin history, politics, and culture. In sum, this chapter articulates the linkage between world literature, Orientalism, modernity, the novel, and spectrality at the heart of this book.","PeriodicalId":125419,"journal":{"name":"Specters of World Literature","volume":"46 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133622051","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Women in the Literary Marketplace: The Anglophone Iranian Novel and the Feminist Subject 文学市场中的女性:以英语为母语的伊朗小说与女权主义主题

Specters of World Literature Pub Date : 2020-08-01 DOI: 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474467032.003.0006

Karim Mattar

{"title":"Women in the Literary Marketplace: The Anglophone Iranian Novel and the Feminist Subject","authors":"Karim Mattar","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474467032.003.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474467032.003.0006","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter turns to anglophone Middle Eastern literary production as an increasingly important site for the discursive and representational worlding of the region. I focus on the anglophone Iranian novel, and orient my discussion around questions of gender after the Iranian Revolution of 1979. After an overview of diasporic Iranian literary production in the context of geopolitical tensions with the West, I then delve more deeply into representations of gender. I argue that the massive popular and critical acclaim by which Azar Nafisi’s memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books was met was based on its conformity to and reproduction of the “rogue state” idea of Iran, and its related disavowal of any form of feminism – especially Islamic feminism – other than the secular-liberal or universal. Yasmine Crowther’s and Marjane Satrapi’s (graphic) novels The Saffron Kitchen and Persepolis work against the cosmopolitan literary and political ideals to which Nafisi’s text subscribes, and instead plot trajectories of feminist agency in Iran rooted in and taking their contours from a sense of multiple belonging in nation, religion, family, and profession. They thus bring important Iranian perspectives to bear on the contemporary discussion of Islamic feminism in literature and culture.","PeriodicalId":125419,"journal":{"name":"Specters of World Literature","volume":"4 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130912159","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0