{"title":"Makdisi's War Memoir: Fragments of Self and Place","authors":"S. el-Naga","doi":"10.2307/1350051","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/1350051","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":36717,"journal":{"name":"Alif","volume":"9 1","pages":"87"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2002-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88835099","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}
{"title":"Ahmed De Bourgogne the Impossible Autobiography of a Clandestine","authors":"S. Mehrez","doi":"10.2307/1350049","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/1350049","url":null,"abstract":"The article deals with the problematic reconstruction of the tragic autobiography of a clandestine. The book, Ahmed de Bourgogne is born of the collaboration between the clandestine ex-convict Ahmed Beneddif and the renowned French writer and social scientist Azouz Begag, both of whom are of Algerian origin and belong to the same beur generation in France. Begag who had already published his own, widely acclaimed autobiography, Le gone du Chaaba, renders Bennedif's fluid oral testimony into a structured literary account, thereby molding the self-representation of the subaltern subject. By adopting Beneddif's oral odyssey Begag writes his other unlived destiny--that of the anti-hero which, through personal perseverence, he was able to escape. Indeed, the encounter between Beneddif and Begag, crowned by the co-signed autobiography Ahmed de Bourgogne, provides both sides of the North African immigrant community's story in France. For Beneddif Ahmed de Bourgogne becomes the last chance for salvation, for Begag it becomes an act of redemption. The Beur Star and the Algerian Clandestine The parish of Saint-Michel in Lyon, France, is a well-known refuge for the down-trodden and the under-privileged of every race and ethnic group that seek its help. Father Christian Delorme, the activist priest who heads the parish, has regularly hosted hundreds of cases of desperate individuals and families in the parish residence. (1) He has frequently intervened on their behalf to rectify their situation whether with international organizations or with the French authorities. His political and social activism have also brought him into very close contact with equally militant intellectual circles working for human and political rights of various disadvantaged individuals and groups within France and elsewhere. In 1998 Father Delorme's parish became the ground for what one may consider the meeting of opposites: a highly successful young beur writer, Azouz Begag (2) and a clandestine Algerian ex-convict in France, Ahmed Beneddif. (3) Both men are of the same beur generation, however Begag holds the French nationality while Beneddif does not. Both were born in France to Algerian immigrant workers during the late 1950s and early 1960s; both consider France, not Algeria, their home and the country of their hybrid cultural, social, and political identities. They only came to discover Algeria, their parents' country of origin, late in life and as reluctant visitors. Begag and Beneddif went to school in France but while the former became a renowned writer and social scientist, the latter spent most of his adult life in prison cells and clandestine camps all over Europe and the Mediterranean basin. Both men sought refuge at the parish residence almost at the same time: Beneddif arrived there in 1997 to seek a solution for his illegal status in France, while Begag moved into the parish in 1998 to \"paste together some pieces of [his] personal life that had fallen apart.\" (4) Two","PeriodicalId":36717,"journal":{"name":"Alif","volume":"817 1","pages":"36"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2002-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90224707","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}
{"title":"Sophia Poole: Writing the Self, Scribing Egyptian Women","authors":"S. Abdel-Hakim","doi":"10.2307/1350052","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/1350052","url":null,"abstract":"Sophia Poole (1804-91) was the sister of the Arabist Edward William Lane, She visited Egypt and wrote a book, in three volumes, about Egyptian women which was meant to be a companion book to Lane's Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (1836). The Englishwoman in Egypt (1844-46), always regarded as a correct and objective representation of Egyptian women, is also a reflection of the writer's own visualization and inscription of her identity. Poole, this article argues, defined herself as both an English person and a woman, two aspects that were hard to reconcile at the time. Poole was faced with a conflict which she tried to resolve by both complying with her gender identity and creating a role for herself as a functional Britisher. Yet, she did this largely at the expense of Egyptian women. ********** Sophia Poole, sister of the Arabist Edward William Lane, established herself as a writer after the publication of her text, The Englishwoman in Egypt (1844-46). The text was pronounced a success immediately after its publication, enjoyed a good reception, and a second edition of it appeared the following year in America (Kararah 153). According to Stanley Lane-Poole, the writer's grandson, who is regarded as an authority on the topic, The Englishwoman in Egypt \"gained for her [Poole] ... a place in literature\" (121). After the lapse of a century and a half, in 1994, Jane Robinson, author of the anthology of women travelers, Wayward Women, wrote of Poole: When her highly popular accounts of a lady's life in Egypt were published back in London, they caused a mild sensation. It might be permissible for a learned chap like Lane to immerse himself in the exotic culture of the East--but an Englishwoman? A Christian wife and mother dressing herself up in Turkish \"trousers\" and visiting the city's harems? Living in what she insisted is a haunted house, and witnessing barbarous murders almost on her own doorstep? And, worst of all, taking Turkish baths with the natives? Sophia tempered the sensationalist--with a serious study--to complement Lane's Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians--of the habits and customs of harem life in Cairo ... and qualified herself admirably to write a definitive text to Filth's stupendous photographs of Egypt in the 1850s. (Robinson 305. Emphasis in original.) Robinson's writing on Poole is representative of the current feminist view of our writer. Robinson makes the double argument of the oppression of white women under white patriarchy, and points out Poole's admirable qualification of herself as a competent writer whose work can be placed on equal footing with Lane's and Francis Frith's. Such readings create the double problematic of constructing the female self as a one coherent self that verges on the heroic, thereby following in the footsteps of patriarchal definition and practice. Such readings also tend to applaud imperial perceptions and colonial collaboration rather than acknowledge the rights of the topic ","PeriodicalId":36717,"journal":{"name":"Alif","volume":"91 1","pages":"107"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2002-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80427013","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}
{"title":"Arab-American Autobiography and the Reinvention of Identity: Two Egyptian Negotiations","authors":"W. Hassan","doi":"10.2307/1350048","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/1350048","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines two Anglophone autobiographies by Egyptian immigrants in the United States, Ihab Hassan's Out of Egypt: Scenes and Arguments of an Autobiography (1986) and Leila Ahmed's A Border Passage: From Cairo to America--A Woman's Journey (1999). The two texts are read as Egyptian negotiations of Arab-American identity in the U.S., in the context of modern Egyptian history and Western perceptions of Arabs, Islam, and Middle Eastern politics. The two texts display radically different strategies of negotiating identity that reflect divergent currents in American cultural politics in the second half of the twentieth century. ********** My story began in Egypt, continues in America. But how tell that story of disjunction, self-exile? In fragments, I think, in slips of memory, scraps of thought. In scenes and arguments of a life time, re-membered like the scattered bones of Osiris. Ihab Hassan And I am now at the end point of the story I set out to tell here. For thereafter my life becomes part of other stories, American stories. It becomes part of the story of feminism in America, the story of women in America, the story of women of color in America, the story of Arabs in America, the story of Muslims in America, and part of the story of America itself and of American lives in a world of dissolving boundaries and vanishing borders. Leila Ahmed The question of autobiography as a genre with an ambivalent relationship to historical fact and narrative convention has preoccupied U.S. and French theorists since the early 1960s, when autobiography began to command the attention of literary scholars as a legitimate genre. (1) There are at least two reasons for the canonization, in postmodern culture, of autobiography, which had previously (especially in the reign of New Criticism) been regarded as inferior to enshrined literary genres (Morgan 3-4). One reason is the \"generally perceived autobiographical turn in the literature [of the 1970s and 1980s], both in Europe and the United States ... particularly ... among those contemporary novelists who appear to be playful practitioners of fictional games or who--from the perspective of their ethnic or marginal backgrounds seem to be in search of their ethnic identity within a dominant white culture\" (Hornung and Ruhe 9). Another related reason is the development of feminist and minority criticism, which have questioned the traditional literary canon and brought to the attention of scholars women's and minority writing, especially previously unknown or uncanonical texts, many of which are autobiographical, such as women's letters, fiction, and diaries, and African-American slave narratives. Thus, at a time when postmodern thinkers like Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault pronounced the \"death of the Author\"--as part of the poststructuralist critique of the transcendental subject of the Enlightenment--not only avant-garde white male novelists, but also those marginalized by gender, race, and/or ethnicity","PeriodicalId":36717,"journal":{"name":"Alif","volume":"111 1","pages":"7"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2002-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89551870","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}
{"title":"A Chapter in South African Verse: Interview with Jeremy Cronin","authors":"B. Harlow","doi":"10.2307/1350030","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/1350030","url":null,"abstract":"Jeremy Cronin, a South African poet and politician who spent years in prison and exile, is presently a member of parliament and the deputy general secretary of the South African Communist Party. The interview probes into his poetics and political orientation. Cronin views his prison poems as self-survival strategy, testament to the realities of incarceration, and an attempt to forge a voice of resistance and solidarity in opposition to apartheid and his own white South African upbringing. Cronin sees capitalism as barbaric progress, the need to wean the communist tradition from its own totalitarian habits, and globalization as turning the world into a market. Poetry for him offers the possibility of challenging leftist dogmatism through irony and its ability to evoke the local and the rooted against the standardization of globalization controlled by a few corporations. The interview ends with three exemplary poems of Cronin. Introduction Amnesia classifies Third World countries as 'developing' (structurally adjusted amnesia) ... Jeremy Cronin. \"Even the Dead.\" Even the Dead: Poems, Parables and a Jeremiad. 1997 The report-backs were straightforward: we were all behind schedule and over budget. I might add that we were almost past caring. It seemed impossible that we'd be finished in time for the official opening. The builders were still knocking down walls left, right and centre, and establishing piles of rubble in every room. Ivan Vladislavic. \"The WHITES ONLY Bench.\" Propaganda by Monuments. 1996 Jeremy Cronin was born in South Africa in 1949 and grew up in that country. He spent a year studying in Paris in 1972-73, and lectured in philosophy at the University of Cape Town on his return to South Africa, only to serve 7 years imprisoned--from 1976 to 1983--in Pretoria's Maximum Security prison, for \"seventeen acts of terrorism.\" In other words, \"seventeen underground SACP/ANC pamphlets and newsletters, distributed between 1973 and 1976\" warranted the incarceration. But the pamphlets in prison became poems. And the prisoner has gone on, after continued activism on his release from prison in the United Democratic Front (UDF) and another three years in exile in London, to spend now still another kind of time---as the Deputy General Secretary of the South African Communist Party (SACP), and serves currently as an ANC MP, with a portfolio in Transport. Cronin's writing persists in embracing not just poems, however, but polemic as well, for he also writes regularly--as circumstances and conditions enjoin--for, inter alia, the SACP publications The African Communist and Umsebenzi, which he edits, as well as political editorials for such South African newspapers as the Mail and Guardian and Business Day and literary reviews for The Sunday Independent. Pamphlets and poems, that is to say, continue to animate Cronin's contributions to the verse-making and critical writing of the South African story. But, as the museum worker describes the situation in Iva","PeriodicalId":36717,"journal":{"name":"Alif","volume":"6 1","pages":"252"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2001-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88887812","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}
{"title":"Nur Wer Die Sehnsucht Kennt","authors":"Doris Enright-Clark Shoukri","doi":"10.2307/1350024","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/1350024","url":null,"abstract":"The article examines the nature of Eliot's lyricism, having first suggested that all lyricism is \"an expression of desire, a reaching out for an unattainable fulfilment.\" It takes note of the fact that although Eliot has written lyric lines of incomparable beauty, he did not produce a body of lyric poems. His lyricism seems to break out, as though stifled, rather than to constitute the raison d'etre of his work. The article relates this to the belief expressed by Eliot in \"Tradition and the Individual Talent\" that the poet escapes from rather than \"expresses\" his own personality, which, in turn, would seem to reflect two ideas of Bradley: the first being that all reality is experience and all experience one, and the second that experience is of three orders, immediate, relational, and transcendent. Although much of Eliot's poetry reflects \"relational experience,\" a nostalgia for \"immediacy of experience\" permeates Eliot's work. If we examine his lyric imagery, we find reference almost always to his early life, to a past that he has left behind. The poet's \"first world\" creates his \"rose garden,\" the immediate experience to which he turns and returns. It was only during his last years with his marriage to Valerie, that his abiding loneliness, his hunger for the lost simplicity of his early life, was seemingly assuaged by a happiness akin to that \"immediate experience.\" The effect upon his verse was of dubious merit. ********** Many years ago, while teaching a course on Eliot, I had the students read Keats' \"On First Looking into Chapman's Homer\" and then write an essay entitled \"On first looking into Eliot's The Waste Land.\" Recently, teaching the course again, I had occasion to \"revisit\" Eliot. I came to see that what constituted for me his poetry's appeal was the nostalgia to which it gave voice for an entire generation to which I belong. When all the issues and allusions of The Waste Land which so preoccupy the first reader were all but forgotten, it was its lyricism which remained with us and \"echoed in our minds\" expressing, like all great poetry, \"what cannot be expressed.\" Perhaps all lyricism is the expression of desire, a reaching out for an unattainable fulfillment, addressed for the most part to someone who would seem to possess the promise or at least the possibility of restoring the soul to the fulness of being. The lyric has been defined by Mill as \"the utterance that is overheard,\" by Joyce as a \"cri de coeur;\" it has been spoken of as the silent soliloquy revealing the landscape of the mind. However defined, the recognition of its essential quality persists, which is the need of the poet to speak from his solitude. That Eliot felt this need and possessed great lyric power is, of course, beyond the need to contend, but it is also evident that the corpus of his work contains few poems that one would label in entirety \"lyric;\" no sonnet series, no pourings out of his heart to the beloved, nor to the reader for that matter. Instead we ","PeriodicalId":36717,"journal":{"name":"Alif","volume":"218 1","pages":"101"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2001-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75609874","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}
求助内容：
应助结果提醒方式：
京公网安备 11010802042870号
