Can Reading Animate Justice?

In this study, I make audible a conversation in Alf Layla wa-Layla (The Thousand and One Nights) on the meaning and application of justice. Without assuming that Alf Layla constituted an organized whole, the study identifies, in the frame narrative and the first two chains of stories—all three understood to belong to the earliest bundle—a debate on the coincidence of successful interpretation and just rulership. By the end of these tales, i.e., by the twenty-seventh night, a complete tale is told. In these stories, I propose, Alf Layla adopts an attitude that privileges multiplicity over singular interpretation, in a fashion that affirms thecontingency of ethical questions. The popularity of Alf Layla and the afterlives it enjoyed up to our present times—in the Arab world and the West—need not eclipse or substitute the Arabo-Islamic character the work came to exhibit, and the ethical questions it set out to address. In what has been read as fate, arbitrary logic, enchantment, magic, irrational thinking, and nocturnal dreamlike narratives, I suggest we can equally speak of a concern for justice. The study looks at Alf Layla’s affinity with advice literature, but stresses the need to read it as a work of (semipopular) literature that pays witness to societal debates on justice. Alf Layla, I suggest, belongs to Islamic culture in that the act of reading has been construed within hermeneutics that are largely informed by the ethical implication knowledge sharing entails. In how the stories find resolution to the crisis of the king, Alf Layla understands justice as an artificial and communal enterprise. The stories, more urgently, seem to suggest reading gears us towards a concern for the greater good. Keywords: The Thousand and One Nights (Arabian Nights, 1001 Nights, Alf Layla wa-Layla), Adab, Justice, Rulership, Readership, Advice Literature, Interpretation, Multiplicity, Legitimacy

“Advanced Marriage Technique”: Sex as a Perfectible Skill in Mid-twentieth-century American Marriage Manuals

While earlier marital advice literature treated sexual intercourse as a matter of conditioned instinct, marriage manuals in the mid-twentieth century portrayed it as a skill, and one that was rarely cultivated adequately. The didactic, quantified, objectively examined and rule-bound approach to sex promulgated by these manuals parallels other ways in which Americans subjected their personal and intimate lives to the tutelage of experts. Anxieties about the stability of marriage and family life were both heightened and salved by the authoritative tone of scientific authority used in these books.

Advice Literature in the Time of Akbar: A Sixteenth-Century mathnawī as a book of advice for the Emperor of Mughal India

This article is an attempt to add a mathnawī of the sixteenth century Mughal India composed by a Mughal poet and noble, Mīrzā Khanjar Beg, for his contemporary ruler, Akbar, to the vast treasure of what is known as the advice literature or Mirror for Princes. The article deals with the content, structure, and style of the mathanwī, and contextualises it in contemporary partisan politics along with an emphasis on its features as an advice book for rulers.

Young Minds – Young Bodies: The Emotional and the Physical in the Late Soviet Discourse on Aging

This article analyzes the turn to the emotional in advice literature on aging and its reception in the 1950s–1960s. “Positive emotions” were proclaimed a decisive factor in remaining healthy while old and being a productive member of the society. Yet, a close reading of the multiple narratives of aging written by a retired professional propagandist Tatiana Ivanova (1898–1968) reveals a tension between the prescribed “positive emotions” and feelings of sadness and uselessness caused by retirement, unfulfilled promises of the Soviet welfare system and particularly health problems that did not quite fit with the approved repertoire of an aging communist. This article seeks to enrich our understanding of late Soviet subjectivity by focusing not on just “speaking” or “thinking” but also “feeling” Soviet.

Learning to consume emotional experiences

This chapter focuses on the construction of the holidaymaker as an emotional subject by exploring vacationers’ expectations and experiences and examining how they actively shaped and were shaped by Victorian and Edwardian holiday culture. Drawing on popular stories and poems, vacationers’ accounts, and advice literature, it analyses the reciprocal relations between emotion knowledge, consumption, and subjectivity, emphasizing the various roles individuals played in the emotional economy of holidaymaking: as agents in the negotiation of the value ascribed to emotional experiences, as spectators and performers in the experience, and as co-producers of emotion knowledge. Homing in on moments of disappointment and boredom, the chapter demonstrates that holidaymakers of different genders and classes were aware of the medical view of holidaymaking, even though they did not always experience what was promised. Furthermore, the chapter explores the performative nature of holidaymaking, exposing the ways in which holidaymakers ‘learned how to feel’ by taking a disciplinary view of themselves and others during the holiday experience and by producing and consuming advice and popular literature that provided knowledge on what the emotional experience of holidays was supposed to be like. In contrast to frequent carnivalesque theorizations of holiday tourism, the resorts did not supply only change or contrast; they also provided a sense of normality, security, and familiarity. Tracing the development of the holidaymaker as a self-reflective consumer, the chapter also analyses the affinity between holidaymaking and authenticity.