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Decadent Orientalisms: The Decay of Colonial Modernity

David Fieni

This book explores the confluence of decadence and Orientalism since the mid-nineteenth century in French and Arabic writing. It demonstrates how French Orientalism set the terms of modernity for ... More

This book explores the confluence of decadence and Orientalism since the mid-nineteenth century in French and Arabic writing. It demonstrates how French Orientalism set the terms of modernity for Arab and Muslim thinkers and writers, but also how the latter responded to and transformed these terms. The book argues that Orientalism is doubly decadent: it describes the supposedly inherent degeneration of the Semitic and the “Oriental,” and in so doing Orientalism attempts to contribute to the decay of these societies. Through comparative close readings of French, Francophone, and Arabic texts, the author outlines how notions and representations of decadence and decay during the colonial and postcolonial periods have in fact produced symbolic and social disintegration in parts of the Arab world. Part 1 of the book examines the role of philology, secularism, Islamic reformism, and colonial policy in the configurations of colonial modernity during the second half of the nineteenth century, focusing on the Arab East (or Mashreq) and Algeria. Part 2 turns to Maghreb to explore the ways that loss becomes nationalized and gendered in the postcolonial era and how Maghrebi writers engage with the legacy of Orientalist decadence to find ways beyond it. In the context of these questions, it offers analyses of work by a wide range of writers, including Ernest Renan, Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, Ahmed Faris al-Shidyaq, Farah Antun, Céline, Tahar Wattar, Tahir Djaout, Ahlam Mosteghanemi, Yamina Méchakra, Assia Djebar, Hélène Cixous, Abdelwahab Meddeb, and Abdelkebir Khatibi.Less

The Disposition of Nature: Environmental Crisis and World Literature

Jennifer Wenzel

What role have literature and other cultural imagining played in shaping understandings of the world and the planet, for better and for worse? How might the formal innovations, rhetorical appeals, ... More

What role have literature and other cultural imagining played in shaping understandings of the world and the planet, for better and for worse? How might the formal innovations, rhetorical appeals, and sociological imbrication of world literature help confront unevenly distributed environmental challenges, including global warming? This book examines the rivalry between world literature and postcolonial theory from the perspective of environmental humanities, Anthropocene anxiety, and the material turn. Drawing its examples primarily from Africa and South Asia, it takes a contrapuntal approach to sites and subjects dispersed in time and space. Reading for the planet means reading from near to there: across experiential divides, between specific sites, at more than one scale. Recurrent concerns across the chapters are the multinational corporation (and the colonial charter company) as a vector of globalization and source of cultural imaginings and environmental harm; who (or what) can be regarded as a person; scenes of world-imagining from below in which characters or documentary subjects situate their experience within a transnational context; and formal strategies that invite reflexivity from the audience, in order to register, at the level of literary form, the uneven universality of vulnerability to environmental harm. The book argues for the relevance of the literary to environmental thought and practice. An understanding of cultural imagining and narrative logics can foster more robust accounts of global inequality, to energize movements for justice and livable futures.Less

The Literary Qur'an: Narrative Ethics in the Maghreb

Hoda El Shakry

The Literary Qurʾan: Narrative Ethics in the Maghreb mobilizes the Qurʾan’s formal, narrative, and rhetorical qualities, alongside its attendant embodied practices and hermeneutical strategies, to ... More

The Literary Qurʾan: Narrative Ethics in the Maghreb mobilizes the Qurʾan’s formal, narrative, and rhetorical qualities, alongside its attendant embodied practices and hermeneutical strategies, to theorize Maghrebi literature. Challenging the canonization of secular modes of reading that occlude religious epistemes, practices, and intertexts, it attends to literature as a site in which the process of entextualization obscures ethical imperatives. To that end, the book engages the classical Arab-Islamic tradition of adab—a concept demarcating the genre of belles lettres, as well as the moral dimensions of personal and social conduct. Reading Islam through its intersecting ethical and epistemological dimensions, it argues that the critical pursuit of knowledge is inseparable from the spiritual cultivation of the self. Foregrounding questions of form and praxis, The Literary Qurʾan stages a series of pairings that invite paratactic readings across texts, languages, and literary canons. Reflecting both critical methodology and argument, it places twentieth-century novels by canonical Francophone writers (Abdelwahab Meddeb, Assia Djebar, Driss Chraïbi) into conversation with lesser-known Arabophone ones (Maḥmūd al-Masʿadī, al-Ṭāhir Waṭṭār, Muḥammad Barrāda). Blending literary and theological methodologies, conceptual vocabularies, and reading practices, the study builds upon an interdisciplinary body of scholarship across literary theory, Islamic and Qurʾanic studies, philosophy, anthropology, and history.Less

Old Schools: Modernism, Education, and the Critique of Progress

Ramsey McGlazer

This book marks out a modernist counter-tradition. The book proceeds from an anachronism common to Italian- and English-language literature and cinema: a fascination with outmoded, paradigmatically ... More

This book marks out a modernist counter-tradition. The book proceeds from an anachronism common to Italian- and English-language literature and cinema: a fascination with outmoded, paradigmatically pre-modern educational forms that persists long after they are displaced in modernizing, reform-minded pedagogical theories. Old Schools shows that these old-school teaching techniques organize key works by Walter Pater, Giovanni Pascoli, James Joyce, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Glauber Rocha. All of these figures oppose ideologies of progress by returning to and creatively reimagining the Latin class long since left behind by progressive educators. Across the political spectrum, advocates of progressive education, from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to John Dewey and Giovanni Gentile, had targeted Latin in particular. The dead language—taught through time-tested techniques including memorization, recitation, copying out, and other forms of repetition and recall—needed to be updated or eliminated, reformers argued, so that students could breathe free and become modern, achieving a break with convention and constraint. By contrast, the works that Old Schools considers valorize instruction’s outmoded techniques, even at their most cumbersome and conventional. Like the Latin class to which they return, these works produce constraints that feel limiting but that, by virtue of that very limitation, invite valuable resistance. As they turn grammar drills into verse and repetitious lectures into voiceovers, they find unlikely resources for creativity and critique in the very practices that progressive reformers sought to clear away.Less

Queer Natures, Queer Mythologies

Sam See

Christopher Looby and Michael North (eds)

This book collects the scholarly work that Sam See had completed as of his death in 2013. It includes essays that have been previously published in leading journals as well as materials that remained ... More

This book collects the scholarly work that Sam See had completed as of his death in 2013. It includes essays that have been previously published in leading journals as well as materials that remained unpublished. Its parts represent the two book projects that See hoped to complete: Queer Natures: Feeling Degenerate in Literary Modernism and Queer Mythologies: Community and Memory in Modern Literature. The first reinterprets the key term nature, central to so many discussions of literature and sexuality. For See, nature is no longer an unchanging substrate or a philosophical given. Relying on a thorough reading of Darwin, See argues instead that nature is constantly and aimlessly variable. Since it makes room for the aesthetic, by way of what Darwin called sexual selection, nature is also affected by feeling. On these grounds, See argues that nature itself might be considered queer. The second project proposes that, understood as queer in this way, nature might be made the foundational myth for the building of queer communities. See looks at the ways in which queer community has been imagined in literary works from a wide range of authors, and he analyzes the role that literature has played in providing significant aesthetic versions of that community. Locating the various failures of these myths is a way, he hopes, of approaching another, more successful communal story. In addition to his reading of Darwin, See provides new interpretations of modern writers including Langston Hughes, Virginia Woolf, Oscar Wilde, Hart Crane, and T. S. Eliot.Less

Radical Botany: Plants and Speculative Fiction

Natania Meeker and Antónia Szabari

Radical Botany uncovers a long speculative tradition of plant fiction that conjures up new languages to grasp the life of plants—their vegetality—in all its specificity and vigor. The first part of ... More

Radical Botany uncovers a long speculative tradition of plant fiction that conjures up new languages to grasp the life of plants—their vegetality—in all its specificity and vigor. The first part of the book reaches back to seventeenth-century materialisms to show how plants, rather than being systematically excluded from human deliberation, have in fact participated in modernity. The French authors with whom the work begins turn to plants to think through the problems and paradoxes that face all forms of life considered first as matter. Within this framework, plants are ascribed an agency and vitality that might otherwise seem foreign to them, but they are also envisioned as beings that resist incorporation into human contexts and thus have something to teach humans about their limitations and vulnerabilities. Classically, the botanical sciences that develop over the course of the long eighteenth century function as a project for ordering, visualizing, labeling, and classifying life. In Radical Botany, the authors unearth an alternative set of engagements with the plant as a life form—a tradition that conceives of vegetal life as resisting representability even as it participates in the production of new representational modes—including the novel, early cinema, and contemporary virtual reality—and new affects—including queer desires, feminist affinities, and ecological solidarities. The radical botanical works this book explores not only prioritize plants as active participants in “their” world but suggest that the apparent passivity of plants can function as a powerful destabilizing force in its own right.Less

Resisting Allegory: Interpretive Delirium in Spenser's Faerie Queene

Harry Berger

David Lee Miller (ed.)

Resisting Allegory gathers essays from the final two decades of Harry Berger, Jr.’s lifelong engagement with Spenser’s great poem The Faerie Queene, making clear the scope and coherence of the ... More

Resisting Allegory gathers essays from the final two decades of Harry Berger, Jr.’s lifelong engagement with Spenser’s great poem The Faerie Queene, making clear the scope and coherence of the critical vision elaborated in a series of seminal and still-challenging critical arguments. Spenser’s great poem provides the occasion for a searching and comprehensive interdisciplinary exploration of reading practices—those the author advocates as well as those he adapts or criticizes in entertaining a wide range of critical arguments with his celebrated combination of intellectual generosity and rigorous questioning. No one writes the way Berger does; no one can combine theoretical scope with close reading the way he can. His distinctive voice, style, and attention to method offer a model to students and younger scholars and should command attention in courses on the method and theory of criticism.Less