The Infinite Scroll

This chapter focuses on Saudi “tweeter” Mujtahidd, who has been leaking by “showing the inside” of the Saudi government and royal family since 2011. It explores how the leaking subject, the unknown Mujtahidd or Mujtahidd the “mystery,” constructs himself as an online character (avatar), author, and knower. Drawing on classical Arabic prose genres such as akhbār (anecdotes, news, lore), it reads the fiction of the leak in relation to the genres of serialized novels and TV series. It argues that the collapse between Twitter user and Twitter as such is at work in Mujtahidd's case as well. Mujtahidd fuses with Twitter, reproducing it as function of revelation, writing genre, and machine à scandale.

Of Literary Supplements, Second Editions, and the Lottery

While Zaydān serialized novels in early issues of Al-Hilāl, which began publishing in Cairo in September 1892, the novel installments staged a gradual migration, from the center of each issue, to the end of the issue, later to become a stand- alone supplement that could be bound as a book at year-end. In later reprints of back issues of the early years of Al-Hilāl -- offered in Zaydān’s time as bound volumes, and comprising the majority of library archives today -- Zaydān’s novels are nowhere to be found. While many a scholar of Arabic literature has been left befuddled by this archive’s early literary poverty, this chapter argues that by carefully attending to these palimpsestic traces of serialization, a history of the Arabic novel comes into view: these early editions reveal to us the historical moment of which they were a product, bearing the mark of a contingent mode of speculation, and of the threatening porosity of fiction and finance.

DICKENS, DINOSAURS, AND DESIGN

Charles Dickens's novels only occasionally feature images of prehistoric creatures. There is, of course, the famous “elephantine lizard. . .waddling. . .up Holborn Hill” in the opening scenes of Bleak House (1852–53), which, as is brilliantly captured in Tom Gauld's recent cartoon “Fragments of Dickens's Lost Novel ‘A Megalosaur's Progress’” (2011), has become a kind of icon of Dickens's entire fictional oeuvre (Figure 1). But beyond Bleak House’s iconic megalosaurus “forty feet long or so,” Dickens's panoramic representations of urban landscapes, which Adelene Buckland has shown to abound with quasi-geological ruins, are usually populated only by their more diminutive modern inhabitants (1; ch. 1). Even when the changing cityscape of “carcases. . .and fragments” of “giant forms” seems, as in Dombey and Son (1847–48), to suggest the presence of colossal fossilized skeletons thrown up by a “great earthquake,” they remain lifeless and merely augment the pervading atmosphere of urban upheaval (46; ch. 6). Animate extinct animals instead appear more commonly in novels by contemporaries such as William Makepeace Thackeray or, later in the century, Henry James. In their fiction, creatures such as the megatherium, a large edentate from the Pliocene epoch, not only afford apposite metaphors for gargantuan manifestations of industrial modernity, as in the former's Mrs. Perkins's Ball (1846) and the latter's The Bostonians (1885–86). More significantly, they also provide a model for the complex structures of serialized novels, whether commendatory, as in Thackeray's The Newcomes (1853–55), or otherwise, as in the famous epithet “large loose baggy monsters” that James coined in the preface to the New York edition of The Tragic Muse (1908) (1:x).