Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Rebecca C. Johnson

This chapter discusses the history of translations in Arabic literature. The book begins with the first translations performed by Lebanese and Egyptian translators under the auspices of British missionary societies in Malta in the 1830s and ends in the first decade of the twentieth century with the translations of British and French sentimental and crime novels published in Cairo. Each connects the purportedly marginal enterprise of translating foreign fiction, performed by well-known and forgotten translators, to the concerns of canonical nahḍa thinkers and the literary and cultural debates in which they participated. These authors developed translation techniques and writing styles that cultivated a new mode of reading that the book calls reading in translation, which required the reader to move comparatively within and among languages and with the awareness of the diverging interpretive frameworks that animated the investments of multiple audiences. Far from being mere bad translators, these authors appear as translation theorists and informed commentators on literary history. Presenting their own work as occurring within an ongoing history of translation rather than deviating from it, these translators contend that the Arabic novel takes translation and cultural transfer as its foundation, as does the European novel. This book takes the implications of these translators' claims seriously, counterpoising them to standard accounts of the novel's supposed travels in translation.

Author(s):  
John Patrick Walsh

This chapter continues to build the conceptual and historical frame of the eco-archive. It argues that contemporary Haitian literature records the transformation of the environment and accumulates and inscribes overlapping temporalities of past and present, like an archive. The first part reviews a range of Caribbean and Haitian thought on the environment, broadly understood, and considers key moments of Haitian literary history of the twentieth century. Earlier forms and paths of migration and refuge, from the sugar migration up to the journeys of “boat people,” inform and historicize literary representations of the earthquake and its aftermath. The chapter then carries out close readings of a selection of René Philoctète’s poetry and his novel, Le peuple des terres mêlées, a text that depicts the “Parsley Massacre” of 1937. It draws out Philoctète’s eco-archival writing and contends that the novel foregrounds the environmental ethos of the border in opposition to Trujillo’s genocidal nationalism.


2019 ◽  
pp. 155-209
Author(s):  
Maya I. Kesrouany

Chapter four investigates tarjama’s dual meaning in Arabic as biography and translation in the works of Ṭāhā Ḥusayn and Muḥammad Ḥusayn Haykal. Following up on the secular prophecy of chapter three, it studies the complex relationship between Islam and literature in the two modernists’ mappings of Arabic literary history and in relation to their approach to translation. It examines specifically Haykal’s two-volume biography of Jean Jacques Rousseau in 1921 and 1923, his biography of the Prophet and literary essays, exploring political and spiritual temporalities in his unfolding critique of colonialism. It then considers Ṭāhā Ḥusayn’s controversial claims about the historicity of Jahili poetry as post-Islamic in On Jahili Poetry (1926) and argues that it prefigures his translations of André Gide ((1946) and Voltaire (1947), resituating his “heretic” claims within his translation theory. It concludes on the failed narrative subjectivities that emerge from the translations’ critique of European Enlightenment thought, contextualizing the importance of these adaptations to the study of the Arabic novel.


2005 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 391-402
Author(s):  
NORBERT BANDIER

The time has come for researchers into innovative movements in art and literature in the first half of the twentieth century to break free from traditional investigative frameworks. The works reviewed here belong to different disciplines – art history, literary history, literary criticism, history – but all show a shift of perspectives in the history of culture. They point to a reassessment of the theoretical models we use to understand modern art and literature. Those models are – in this case as they relate to the avant-garde – nuanced, refined, developed and sometimes even invalidated. Though some of these works are not wholly devoted to the European avant-gardes, they do deal with the international circulation of modern art in, to or from Europe, studied here in its lesser-known aspects. Moreover, they all to some extent examine the artist’s responsibility to the community, or the state’s responsibility to art. This theme of responsibility runs through all these works, either in its ethical dimension or as an aspect of the social function of art, especially when art has to confront an entertainment culture or is roped in as part of cultural policy.


2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 121-141
Author(s):  
Sitti Maryam

Arabic literature has undergone such a long journey from the time of the beginning of the time of Jahili, the period of Islam, the period of Muawiyah service, Abasiah, the Ottoman dynasty, and the modern period until now. In each period of this development, Arabic literature experienced innovations that differentiated it from other periods. In the modern phase in particular, it turns out that Arabic literature has a variety of literary schools that have appeared alternately, both because of the motivation of criticism of the literary models that emerged before and because of refining other streams that emerged in the same period of time. The emergence of this neoclassical school was initially a reaction to Napoleon's arrival in Egypt in 1798, which marked the entry of French culture into the Arab world. This school also maintains strong Arabic poetry rules, for example the necessity to use wazan, qāfiyah, the number of words is very large, the uslūb is very strong, the themes still follow the previous period, such as madah, ritsa (lamentations), ghazal, fakhr, and the movement from one topic to another in one qasidah (ode) Problems raised in this study include: 1. What is the history of Arabic literature? 2. What are the factors that arouse Arabic literature? 3. Who are the pioneers of the neoclassical school? The results in this study are: 1. The history of Arabic literature has experienced such a long journey from the period beginning at the time of Jahili, the period of Islam, the period of Muawiyah's service, Abasiah, the Ottoman dynasty, and the modern period until now. During the Abbasid period there was a period of emotion in Arabic literature, and suffered a setback during the Ottoman period until the beginning of this phase since the reign of Muhammad Ali in Egypt after colonialization Francis ended in 1801. 2. The factors include: Al-Madaris (School -school), Al-Mathba'ah (Printing), Ash-Shuhuf / Al-Jaro'id (Newspaper), and Tarjamah.3. One of the pioneers of the neoclassical school of Arabic poetry or commonly called al-Muhāfizun is Mahmud Sami al Barudi Keywords: arabic literary history, factors, flow, neo classical figure


Author(s):  
Ebtisam Ali Sadiq

Marmaduke Pickthall, a half-forgotten British novelist of the early twentieth century, has come back to the spotlight over the past few years. His Near Eastern novels and short stories have started to receive attention in contemporary scholarship but not his two autobiographies. This essay aims at tackling the more neglected piece of the two, With the Turk in Wartime, that deserves attention because of its intricate amalgamation of several features of the genre of autobiography as manifested across its history within the tradition of English literature. Analysis finds that Pickthall’s autobiography has some Romantic, Victorian, and Modern elements as well as some old characteristics of the genre elaborately interwoven into its structure. The study also traces the use that Pickthall makes of this unique autobiography and how the commingling of diverse elements allows him to turn a usually subjective genre into a public cause and dedicate it to the service of Islam. This essay highlights both the diversity that the literary history of the genre lends to Pickthall’s autobiography and the socio-political service it renders to the faith that the author has long esteemed and will ultimately convert to not long after writing this autobiography.


Author(s):  
Alys Moody

This book has traced a history of modernism’s decline and of its doubters. In post-Vichy France, the US circa 1968, and late apartheid South Africa, modernism’s fate was precarious, its reputation tarnished, and its politics reviled. The inescapability of the political in these contexts compromised the structural conditions of the autonomous literary field on which modernism had been built. In turn, it threw into crisis the philosophical defense of autonomy and the literary legacies of modernism, which grew out of and were guaranteed by this autonomous literary field. The stories we tell about late twentieth-century literary history reflect this dilemma. According to received wisdom, the period between 1945 and 1990 saw postmodernism replace modernism in both literature and scholarship, and new waves of postcolonial literature and theory discredited the Eurocentric specter of modernism. ...


Author(s):  
Karin L. Hooks

Arguing that the changing and more consolidated literary politics of the century’s turn helped make possible the canon wars of the twentieth century, this paper investigates the history of literary histories. Twentieth-century constructs of the field overlook an awareness that late-nineteenth century female literary historians envisioned in terms of a more inclusive and democratic American literary canon. Recovering a literary history largely erased by the turn into the twentieth century through a case study of Sarah Piatt’s career, this chapter focuses on two female literary historians of the 1890s: Ellen Mackay Hutchinson and Jeanette Gilder, whose literary anthologies include Piatt’s writing, unlike those of the following century. Hutchinson, who (with Edmund Clarence Stedman) edited a sizeable collection of American texts, the eleven-volume Library of American Literature, and Jeanette Gilder, co-editor of The Critic, who hosted a popular election to identify the top 125 American women writers of 1890, made arguments for the inclusion of Piatt in the canon that are worth revisiting in light of turn-of-the-century mechanisms for erasing the literary history of which Piatt was a part.


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