Alif最新文献_第8页

Alexandria in Cavafy, Durrell, and Tsirkas 卡瓦菲亚的亚历山大，达雷尔和茨卡斯

Alif Pub Date : 2001-01-01 DOI: 10.2307/1350026

John Rodenbeck

{"title":"Alexandria in Cavafy, Durrell, and Tsirkas","authors":"John Rodenbeck","doi":"10.2307/1350026","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/1350026","url":null,"abstract":"Among the several ways of looking at Alexandria, one is represented by Edmund Keeley's critical book, Cavafy's Alexandria, which condemns the city as \"squalid.\" Another approach, even less generous and far less literal, is that of Lawrence Durrell, whose notions of the city's history, politics, linguistics, ethnography and topography are permeated with unconcealed ethnic and religious hostilities. These attitudes were certainly not shared by Constantine Cavafy, who is repeatedly appealed to by Durrell in the text as a kind of authority. Crucial in Cavafy's work is acceptance of the ordinary mundane physical reality of the city, without which precisely those emotions would be absent that provide significance or meaning. The same fidelity to the world is at the center of Tsirkas' Drifting Cities. Both were writing for the kind of reader who prefers to be told something based upon sensitive observation, rather than something merely imagined. ********** There are several ways of looking at cities like Alexandria. One is represented by an opening passage in Edmund Keeley's critical book, Cavafy's Alexandria, a passage that unfortunately seems to have escaped the notice of Alexandria's city planners. \"Aware of the poet's point of view,\" says Keeley, \"I find it difficult to move through the streets of today's Alexandria without feeling the presence of Cavafy's ghost, especially the threat of its mockery. During my last visit there,\" he writes in 1976, arriving from Greece, I tried to make myself believe that the ugly reality I was seeing masked the presence of another city, more real in its way, a city open to those who could bring to it an imaginative vision, a mythical sensibility, if you will, akin to Cavafy's and exemplified in English letters by E. M. Eorster and Lawrence Durrell. But the mask, the surface reality, was so unlike literary images I brought with me, so immediate and harsh in its effect, that it frustrated any imaginative projection. Shutting his eyes to the glamour that its own dazzling literature has always been able to cast over Alexandria, Keeley attempts to look at one small seaside fragment of the city near the Cecil Hotel with a detachment akin to that of a documentary camera. \"Today's Alexandria,\" he says, strikes one first of all as squalid, if you walk along the esplanade leading to where the wondrous ancient Pharos used to stand (now Fort Kayet Bay [sic] grotesquely restored as a museum celebrating the Egyptian navy), you will encounter odors and sights that will amaze you--if none of the palaces and monuments that amazed Cavafy's exiles. The wall at your side rises just high enough to block all but the most cunning attempts to find the sea beyond, but not enough to conceal the spread of laundry-bannered tenements along the harbor's curve ahead. And the smells you breathe, cut only sporadically by a pinch of sea-salt, are of refuse not quite ripe enough to pass for garbage and of urine too spotty for official concern. The pr","PeriodicalId":36717,"journal":{"name":"Alif","volume":"1 1","pages":"141"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2001-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75138605","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: 7

Signifying the Blues 象征蓝调

Alif Pub Date : 2001-01-01 DOI: 10.2307/1350022

R. Switzer

{"title":"Signifying the Blues","authors":"R. Switzer","doi":"10.2307/1350022","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/1350022","url":null,"abstract":"The essay offers a philosophical examination of the blues, a uniquely powerful and influential twentieth-century musical genre. The examination is undertaken chiefly with reference to the works of Theodor Adorno, Angela Davis and Martin Heidegger--and to the insightful writings on the blues by Tom Lamont. Overall, the article is an attempt to come to terms with the artistic significance of the blues--in part, as a challenge to traditional aesthetic positions and biases. The blues, the article argues, \"signify\" not only in having or bestowing meaning, but in the uniquely African-American sense of the term: in a move that \"undercuts,\" that is at once insinuating and subversive, mocking and transformative. The article endeavors to suggest that this transfigurative force--which it argues must be located more in the music than in the lyrics, and not in the music's \"form\" but in its \"matter,\" its elemental corporeity--can be politically, aesthetically, and even ontologically liberating. Born of suffering and oppression, the blues can offer a profound recasting of the lived world and new possibilities of meaning and expression. ********** Pain gives of its healing power Where we least expect it. Heidegger, \"The Thinker as Poet\" The blues is a feeling--something out there, that can come upon you, that can come \"falling down like rain.\" The blues is also music, striking for its simplicity, its power, and its pervasiveness. We have all known the blues: Many of us have also been drawn to reflect in wonder at the songs and music called the blues, at this elemental expression of what might be called the \"lyrical impulse.\" Heidegger's brief words above hint at redemption. Veteran bluesman John Lee Hooker sings it this way: \"The blues is healing.\" The blues somehow touches us at the core of our inner-most suffering and hurt--whether from betrayal or a sense of powerlessness, or at the loss of a friend who had become, in some measure, like the mirror of one's own soul. (l) But the healing power of the blues is not so much about feeling better, if by this one means that a weight is lifted, that one feels \"happy\" instead of \"blue.\" Doubtless it is part of the captivating mystery of the blues experience that it feels good to sing the blues, and to listen; that one is feeling bad, but somehow feeling good about it. As Ma Rainey sings in \"Ya Da Do,\" \"It's a no-name blues, but'll take away your pains.\" Taken away, but not gone; suffering is not forgotten. Ralph Ellison writes: The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one's aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism. As a form, the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically. (Shadow 78) And indeed, the blues is not an anaesthetic--but a drive towards renewal. In a word, it is about feeling better--in t","PeriodicalId":36717,"journal":{"name":"Alif","volume":"234 1","pages":"25"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2001-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77472775","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: 6

Istiratijiyyat al-Ghiyab Fi Shi'r Sa'di Yusuf

Alif Pub Date : 2001-01-01 DOI: 10.2307/1350038

Sayyid 'Abd Allah, Sa'di Yusuf

引用次数: 0

al-Kitabah Bil-Ibriyah al-Fusha: Taqdim Riwayah Arabsik wa-Hiwar ma Antun Shammas

Alif Pub Date : 2000-01-01 DOI: 10.2307/521962

M. Siddiq, Antun Shammas

引用次数: 1

al-Riwayah al-Muritaniyah wa-Izdiwajiyah al-Asl: Qirah lil-Thabit wa al-Mutahawwil min al-Nas

Alif Pub Date : 2000-01-01 DOI: 10.2307/521957

Muhammad Ibrahim

引用次数: 1

Langues étrangères et traduction dans le champ littéraire égyptien 埃及文学领域的外语和翻译

Alif Pub Date : 2000-01-01 DOI: 10.2307/521940

Richard Jacquemond

{"title":"Langues étrangères et traduction dans le champ littéraire égyptien","authors":"Richard Jacquemond","doi":"10.2307/521940","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/521940","url":null,"abstract":"Literary studies only escaped from the nationalistic paradigm about twenty years ago. This nationalist paradigm dominated literature after the Enlightenment replaced a universal literary culture with a national one. For a long time, only comparative literature tried to find links between national literary traditions, not always very successfully. In the last two decades, the dominance of this nationalist paradigm became challenged by translation studies and postcolonial studies. While the first has stressed exchanges between literary traditions, the second has followed the emergence of a new literary space on a world scale, including not only the old colonial centers, but also the numerous peripheries. By substituting the concept of \"Arabic literary space\" for the notion of \"Arabic literature\", and thus including in it translations, one can reconfigure literary studies and tackle them more systematically. The concept covers not only translations from and to Arabic, but also works written by Arabs in other languages such as English or French, as well as the writings that introduce into Arabic literature themes and elements derived from other languages, whether colonial languages like English or French, or minority languages in the Arab world (Berber, Tuareg, Nubian, Kurdish, etc.). A final category could be the translation into Arabic (\"bringing home\") of works written in other languages by Arab authors. The article deals with Egypt, but its approach could be extended to the entire Arab world.","PeriodicalId":36717,"journal":{"name":"Alif","volume":"135 1","pages":"8-38"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2000-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86302578","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: 1

Identity and Geography in Karim Alrawi's Promised Land 卡里姆·阿拉维应许之地的身份与地理

Alif Pub Date : 2000-01-01 DOI: 10.2307/521946

Mahmoud el Lozy

引用次数: 0

On the Margins of a Memoir: A Personal Reading of Said's Out of Place 在回忆录的边缘:赛义德的《不合时宜》的个人解读

Alif Pub Date : 2000-01-01 DOI: 10.2307/521951

N. Gindi

引用次数: 3

Arab-Muslim Feminism and the Narrative of Hybridity: The Fiction of Ahdaf Soueif 阿拉伯-穆斯林女性主义与混合叙事:阿赫达夫·苏伊夫的小说

Alif Pub Date : 2000-01-01 DOI: 10.2307/521945

A. Malak