Literary Modernity between Arabic and Persian Prose: Jurji Zaydan's Riwayat in Persian Translation

Our understanding of nineteenth-century literary practice is often mediated by the national literature model of study that continues to govern discussions of modern literature. Put differently, contemporary evaluations of literary texts of the nineteenth century are often arrived at by using the national literature models that remain ascendant. This results in particular from the interplay of two concepts, 'nationalism' and 'novelism', and the role that these ideological agendas play in establishing the frameworks for literary study that predominate in today's academy. Novelism is defined by Clifford Siskin as 'the habitual subordination of writing to the novel' —it is the prevalent tendency to approach prose writing in general using a framework of value derived from criticism of the novel.1 Rather than evaluating texts of the period in question by using criteria that can be validly ascribed to the sites of their production, we often tend to employ instead criteria derived from the novel as a currently-ascendant form of writing. Together with the tendency to read literature as defined exclusively by the trajectories offered in national-literature frameworks, this dual agenda has come to represent the most widespread tendency in literary historical scholarship, that of the nationalist-novelist paradigm, which presumes national literatures to be its subject matter, and which evaluates (non-European) prose writing largely through the critical tools developed for assessing the European novel

The Changing Value of "Alf Laylah wa Laylah" for Nineteenth-Century Arabic, Persian, and English Readerships

This article traces the social and cultural circumstances of nineteenth-century c lations and translations of Alf Laylah wa Laylah into English, Arabic, or Per particular to gauge what cultural value these modem editions were thought t for their readerships. Through an examination of the critical discourse aroun text, it can be shown how the text's cultural value was transformed through actions"--the translations and appropriations. The transformation of the valu text during this period illuminates the changing social role of literary prac consumption in these s

The Unintended Gift: The Adventures of Hajji Baba Ispahani as a Transactional Text Between English and Persian Literatures

The value of literary translations such as Mırza H: abıb Is:fahanı’s translation of James Morier’s The Adventures of Hajji Baba Ispahani must be understood as determined by the interrelated issues of inter-cultural power dynamics and the construction of literary value in the social contexts of both their origins and their destinations. Thus, we may consider this kind of inter-cultural literary relationship as a form of transaction, with texts and readings measured by both a system of values, and one of costs. This article follows the history of the production of Hajji Baba, through its translation into Persian, and examines its possible value within the social context of the Iranian constitutional revolution. It ends by proposing a possible homophony between the British colonial imaginary and the reformist nationalist discourses foundational to the constitutional revolution, despite the contradictions that remain unresolved with a text that has been accorded high value—if through transaction—within both of these contexts

Review: Displaced Allegories by Negar Mottahedeh

Review of Negar Mottahedeh's book Displaced Allegorie

Trauma and Maturation in Women’s War Narratives: The Eye of the Mirror and Cracking India

A comparative study of Liana Badr’s The Eye of the Mirror and Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India shows that these two novels present intriguingly similar feminist frameworks through which the traumas of war and communal violence may be addressed. They do so by erasing the distinction between literary work and critical social history, producing what we may term counterhistories of the Lebanese Civil War and the Partition of India. In both of these novels, a girl upon the verge of sexual maturation sees the eruption of violence in the society around her to be fundamentally analogous to the inherent violence that accompanies the new social role she is being thrust into as a woman—this is achieved through the presentation of the narrative from the character’s “naïve perspective.” These and the other literary strategies in the texts destabilize what is anticipated in the predominant war narrative, by linking the political, oft en nationalist violence of these stories to the intimate violence sustaining the structures of patriarchal social institutions within which the characters exist

Opening a Space for the Audience: A Dialogue with Kamran Rastegar about Composing MENA Cinema Soundtracks

This article is an edited transcript of a dialogue between the comparative literature professor, musician and composer Kamran Rastegar and film scholar Shohini Chaudhuri. While existing interviews and analysis on film composing largely focus on Hollywood practice, this dialogue provides new insights from Rastegar’s experiences of composing soundtracks for independent Middle Eastern cinema – specifically, his collaboration with the Palestinian director Annemarie Jacir. It explores his musical training and background, his roles as composer, music supervisor and musician, the process of film composing, approaches to music in film scholarship, and sound-image relations and musical choices in Jacir’s films Like Twenty Impossibles (2003), Salt of this Sea (2008) and When I Saw You (2012)