Carnivals of Heterodoxy in Abdelwahab Meddeb’s Talismano

2019 ◽  
pp. 58-80
Author(s):  
Hoda El Shakry
Keyword(s):  
Religious Institutions ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Sunni Islam ◽  
Critical Writings

Chapter 2 analyzes Tunisian writer and critic Abdelwahab Meddeb’s (1946–2014) wildly experimental 1979 novel Talismano. The labyrinthine text takes the reader on a hallucinatory journey through Tunisia’s topography—historical and contemporary, imagined and mythical—through a multitude of languages, temporalities, and religious discourses. The story presciently traces the evolution of a popular rebellion as it winds its way through the cityscape of Tunis’s medina bearing a retinue of prophets, artisans, sorceresses, alchemists, and prostitutes. The chapter examines Meddeb’s polemical attack on Bourguiba-era Tunisia, in which hegemonic power is simultaneously concentrated in state and religious institutions. Talismano subsequently demonstrates the co-constitutional nature of religious and state epistemologies, as well as their attendant institutions and discourses. The novel counteracts these forces in its rescripting of the Qurʾan, as well as its invocation of Sufi figures, texts, and rituals. The chapter contextualizes Talismano’s Sufi poetics within the Meddeb’s polemical critical writings against “orthodox” Sunni Islam.

The "irrational Heart": Romantic Disillusionment in and

2007 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 101-116
Author(s):  
John Bolin
Keyword(s):  
Significant Relationship ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Critical Writings

Beckett's personal and critical writings in the early 1930s evidence a dismissive attitude toward Goethe's Werther and other German Romantic figures such as Rilke. (1935-1936), however, suggests that, far from simply rejecting , by the mid 30s Beckett found the novel useful as a paradigm which he could at once satirize and pursue. This essay attempts to sketch a pattern of correspondence between these two works, indicating 's affiliation with a tradition of "romantic disillusionment." While often read as a novel of ideas, thus reveals a significant relationship to a romantic legacy of irrational desire. It is suggested a recognition of this debt helps make sense of a fundamental negativity at the end of the novel which has not been fully appreciated.

Securitization as a Tool of Regime Survival: The Deployment of Religious Rhetoric in Bashar al-Asad's Speeches

2021 ◽  
Vol 75 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-32
Author(s):  
Rahaf Aldoughli
Keyword(s):  
Religious Rhetoric ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Security Measures ◽  
National Unity ◽  
State Security ◽  
Sunni Islam ◽  
Regime Survival

This article analyzes the role of Sunni Islam in speeches given to religious scholars by Syrian president Bashar al-Asad in 2014 and 2017. I discuss how religion was used in these speeches as a security tool to consolidate authority, legitimize the Ba'thist regime, and marginalize political dissidents. I specifically highlight the emphasis Asad placed on convincing government-recognized 'ulama to support state security measures and to the novel links he constructed between Islam and national unity.

Threads of Transmission in Muḥammad Barrāda’s Luʿbat al-nisyān

2019 ◽  
pp. 141-158
Author(s):  
Hoda El Shakry
Keyword(s):  
Mikhail Bakhtin ◽  
Narrative Structure ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Literary Critic ◽  
Theological Discourse ◽  
Narrative Time ◽  
The One ◽  
Critical Writings

Literary critic and novelist Muḥammad Barrāda’s (b.1938) experimental 1987 Luʿbat al-Nisyān [the Game of Forgetting] is considered the Arabic postmodernist novel par excellence. The “nuṣ riwāʾī” [novelistic text] oscillates between historical, narrative, and meta-narrative time, as well as between diegetic and meta-textual narrators. Rather than aligning its authorial decentering and rhizomatic narrative structure with the collapsing of theological discourse as a totalizing force, this chapter reads Luʿbat al-Nisyān through Qurʾanic narratology and intertextuality. It situates the novel, on the one hand, in relation to Barrāda’s extensive critical writings on literary experimentation [tajrīb] and translation of Mikhail Bakhtin. On the other, it theorizes the work through narrative and formal modes and inflected by the Qurʾan—such as iltifāt, or rhetorical code-switching. Moreover, Luʿbat al-Nisyān’s use of multiple narrative perspectives and genealogies critically interrogates the hermeneutical practices surrounding the documentation, verification, and transmission of the apostolic tradition of hadith.

Maurice and Religion

2020 ◽  
pp. 154-174
Author(s):  
Krzysztof Fordoński
Keyword(s):  
First Century ◽  
British Society ◽  
Religious Institutions ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
The World ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Role Of Religion ◽  
Changing Role

This chapter explores the role and representation of religion in the text of Maurice and in critical readings of the novel. Concentrating primarily on the text itself, the chapter offers close readings of those parts of the novel where religion/religions play a part, stressing their importance in the structure of the novel. This analysis retraces the influence of religion (predominantly Christianity but also ancient Greek and pagan religious thought) on the main characters’ psychological development and behaviour, especially on the way they try to deal with irreconcilable demands of religion and their own psyche. The chapter thus reflects on Forster’s attitude towards religious institutions and the changing role religion played in early twentieth-century British society and among Edwardian writers. The chapter also considers the role of religion in the reception of the novel, both in scholarship and among twenty-first-century readers. The chapter concludes by considering questions of reception and the relevance of Maurice to twenty-first-century (queer) readers as concepts of homosexuality have undergone considerable changes in parts of the world.

Charles Dickens: The Woolf Afterlife

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 292-310
Author(s):  
Michael Hollington
Keyword(s):  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Jane Austen ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Fyodor Dostoevsky ◽  
Bleak House ◽  
Familiar Essay ◽  
The One ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Critical Writings

This essay begins with a survey of attitudes towards Charles Dickens in the extended Stephen family, as these were inherited by the modernist writer Virginia Woolf. On the one hand, there is the strongly negative view of her Uncle Fitzy (Sir James Fitzjames Stephen), and the lukewarm, rather condescending opinion of her father Leslie Stephen. On the other, there is the legacy of enthusiastic attention and appropriation from William Makepeace Thackeray's two daughters – her aunt Anne Thackeray Ritchie and (posthumously) Min, Leslie Stephen's first wife. In the second section I survey Woolf's critical writings on Dickens, adding a glance at the opinions of her husband Leonard. In both, there is an evolution towards greater attention and enthusiasm. Besides Woolf's familiar essay on David Copperfield (1849–50), I give prominence to lesser-known writings, in particular to her laudatory assessment and analysis of Bleak House (1852–3). The third and final part concerns signs of the influence of Dickens in Woolf's first novel, The Voyage Out (1915). The earlier, satiric part of the novel shows the impact both of Jane Austen and Dickens as ironists and humourists. During the tragic conclusion, influenced by a reading of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Jane Austen drops out, but Dickens is retained.

scholarly journals A Biographical Novel of the Spanish Civil War: Lydie Salvayre's Pas pleurer (2014)

2020 ◽  
pp. 139-149
Author(s):  
Jeannette Gaudet
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
Social Revolution ◽  
Religious Institutions ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Passionate Love ◽  
Georges Bernanos ◽  
The One

This article focuses on the biographical novel, Pas pleurer (2014) and the author Lydie Salvayre’s development of two diametrically opposed experiences of the Spanish civil war. Pas pleurer deploys the author’s parallel engagement with Montse, Salvayre’s mother, and with Georges Bernanos through a reading and commentary of the polemical essay, Les Grands Cimetières sous la lune. Biographical material provides the ground for intersecting narratives: on the one hand, the Bernanos intertext with its keen analysis of the complicity of secular and religious institutions to maintain control of Spain through terrorism and violence reverberates throughout and finds its echo in the tragic story of Montse’s older brother José. Set against this is the adolescent Montse’s encounter with the dramatic social revolution underway in the Catalan city and her life-altering experience of passionate love, the memory of which remains intact and luminous despite age and disease. Examining both n arratives highlights the act of resistance at the heart of the novel and captured by its title.

Leavis, F. R. (1895–1978)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kate Atkinson
Keyword(s):  
English Education ◽  
English Literature ◽  
English Poetry ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Literary Critic ◽  
Academic Position ◽  
Time In Literature ◽  
Early Influence ◽  
Critical Writings

Frank Raymond Leavis was an influential, though controversial, literary critic and teacher who was raised and educated in Cambridge, England, where he eventually held a permanent academic position. In 1929, he married a student, Q. D. (Queenie Dorothy, née Roth [1906–81]), with whom he engaged in a lifelong intellectual partnership. Known for his uncompromising intellectual stances, Leavis built on the tradition of journalism-based criticism by articulating the role of the academic critic in English. After taking eight years to produce his first book, New Bearings in English Poetry (1932), Leavis published prolifically, covering topics in poetry, the novel, and English education, always seeking to address questions of the worth and objectives of reading. Leavis dedicated a large part of his career to interpretations of the work of modernist writers D. H. Lawrence and T. S. Eliot, of whom he claimed, ‘our time, in literature, may fairly be called the age of D. H. Lawrence and T. S. Eliot’; indeed, Eliot’s own critical writings from the 1930s were an important early influence on Leavis (Storer 54). Leavis had publicly antagonistic relationships with some scholars, including C. P. Snow; despite his intellectual combativeness, he is respected as one of the founders of the modern study of English literature.

Fielding: A Lifeworld of Books

2019 ◽  
pp. 107-150
Author(s):  
Karin Kukkonen
Keyword(s):  
The Novel ◽  
Sarah Fielding ◽  
Novel Reading ◽  
Critical Writings

This chapter investigates how Sarah Fielding develops the kind of writing that leads readers to engage with the novel in a mode of reading that is both immersed and reflective. It traces this project through Fielding’s comments on novel reading in her critical writings, her translation of Xenophon’s Memoirs of Socrates, and her own experimental metafiction in the 1750s (also in collaboration with Jane Collier). Fielding, it is shown, brings novel reading and its immersive qualities into conversation with the debates between the ancients and the moderns and the transhistorical perspectives arising from the mock-heroic mode. Also the theatre, and in particular Fielding’s engagement with Shakespeare, is shown to contribute to her bid to create the kind of novel that can both immerse readers and make them think.

The Irish Novelist as Critic and Anthologist

2020 ◽  
pp. 621-640
Author(s):  
Eve Patten
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
The Political ◽  
National Context ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Critical Commentary ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Literary Anthologies ◽  
Critical Writings ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

This chapter analyses the ways in which Irish novelists have positioned themselves, through their fiction and their critical writings, in relation to Irish traditions of the novel and the short story. It examines a strategic scepticism towards the national novel tradition by looking to a key decade, the 1990s, when a much-celebrated pre-millennial Irish fiction evolved an internal critical commentary on its own fragility, one arguably influenced by postcolonial theorizing on the long-term failure of Irish realism. The chapter proceeds to show how the same decade witnessed the positive consolidation of an Irish fictional lineage through influential literary anthologies compiled by Dermot Bolger and Colm Tóibín respectively. It finds that both collections foreground the strength of the Irish novel in the late twentieth century, while also showing how the genre remained beset by the political pressures of the national context and a problematic Irish literary inheritance.

scholarly journals 'n Boer in beton: "Hierdie huis" deur Kleinboer

2018 ◽  
Vol 55 (2) ◽  
pp. 148-169
Author(s):  
H. P. Van Coller
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Specific Context ◽  
South African Literature ◽  
Dutch Literature ◽  
Ivan Vladislavic ◽  
Urban Writing ◽  
The City ◽  
Critical Writings

This review article is an attempt to interpret and evaluate the novel Hierdie huis within a specific context, namely that of urban writing. This is done first and foremost with reference to Afrikaans literature, but also in a wider context with reference to English South African literature (e.g. Ivan Vladislavic) and to relevant theories like that of the city dweller (flâneur) in the critical writings of Walter Benjamin. In recent Dutch literature several novels have been published (amongst others by Marc Reugebrink and Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer) that share certain motifs and strategies with Kleinboer’s trilogy and they are discussed in greater detail. In this article the focus is on this third novel in what ostensibly is a coherent trilogy or prose cycle and not primarily a rejection of the traditional Afrikaans farm novel as often is asserted by literary critics; in actual fact it is a creative renewal of this genre, although often in a parodical fashion. In conclusion this novel is described as typical of “metamodernism” in its quest for meaningful moral and philosophical “master” narratives, rejected in postmodernism. In this novel the main character recognizes The Other as a fellow human-being and his etymological quests stresses hybridity which implies that linguistic (or racial) purity is a farce. Postcolonial métissage is central in this novel and the conclusion is that the forming of new identities has seldom (or never) been described in Afrikaans literature as in this trilogy.

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