Specters of World Literature
Orientalism, Modernity, and the Novel in the Middle East
1st Edition
Published on 2. April 2020
361 pages
978-1-4744-6706-3 (ISBN)
Description
At the heart of this book is a spectral theory of world literature that draws on Edward Said, Aamir Mufti, Jacques Derrida and world-systems theory to assess how the field produces local literature as an "e;other"e; that haunts its universalising, assimilative imperative with the force of the uncanny. It takes the Middle Eastern novel as both metonym and metaphor of a spectral world literature. It explores the worlding of novels from the Middle East in recent years, and, focusing on the pivotal sites of Middle Eastern modernity (Egypt, Turkey, Iran), argues that lost to their global production, circulation and reception is their constitution in the logic of spectrality. With the intention of redressing this imbalance, it critically restores their engagements with the others of Middle Eastern modernity and shows, through a new reading of the Middle Eastern novel, that world literature is always-already haunted by its others, the ghosts of modernity.
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07/2020
Edinburgh University Press
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Content
- Intro
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Note on Transliterations
- Introduction: Towards a Spectral Theory of World Literature
- I THE WORLDING OF "LITERATURE" IN THE MIDDLE EAST
- 1 The Shabah of Modernity: World-Systems, the Petro-Imperium, and the Indigenous Trace
- 2 A Genealogy of Adab in the Comparative Middle East
- II The Middle Eastern Novel and the Spectral Life-World of Modernity
- 3 The Revolution of Form: Naguib Mahfouz from the Suez Crisis to the Arab Spring
- 4 Islam and the Limits of Translation: Orhan Pamuk and the Ottoman Revival
- 5 Women in the Literary Marketplace: The Anglophone Iranian Novel and the Feminist Subject
- Conclusion: Futures of Spectrality
- Bibliography
- Index
