Order and Disorder

Order and Disorder presents a collection of interdisciplinary essays that emerged from the University of Jendouba's international colloquium on the theme of order and disorder in literature, language, and culture. Edited by Sihem Arfaoui, Noureddine Fekir, and J. S. Mackley, the volume brings together scholars from Tunisia, Europe, and the United Kingdom to examine the interplay between stability and disruption-whether in philosophy, theology, literature, linguistics, or world politics. The contributors question inherited notions of harmony, hierarchy, and control, proposing instead that disorder can function as a necessary condition for creativity and renewal. Beginning with reflections on the "Humanist project under erasure," the collection explores the philosophical, linguistic, and artistic tensions that define modernity. Essays range from studies of the Anglo-Norman Voyage of St Brendan and Keats's Lamia to analyses of Okara's "Once Upon a Time," Mandanipour's Censoring an Iranian Love Story, and O'Neill's The Great God Brown. Other contributions investigate the linguistic order of Tunisian Arabic, the rhetoric of journalism, and the ideological reconfiguration of political power. Throughout, the volume considers how the dual concepts of order and disorder reflect a deeper dialectic in human thought-from classical metaphysics and Christian cosmology to post-structuralist theory and post-revolutionary Tunisia. This scholarly collection invites readers to see disorder not as negation but as transformation: a force through which meaning, freedom, and artistic expression continually reinvent themselves.