Abstract
This chapter focuses on both the theoretical importance and the practical experience of teaching the dynamics of early Arab literary modernity to non-specialist audiences–undergraduate and graduate–in comparative literature. Two problems emerge in this context: first, the self-Orientalism of nahḍah texts, which often uphold a thesis of post-Ottoman "decline" and post-European "awakening" and thus reinforce Orientalist views of Arab-Islamic culture in a post-9/11 era of anti-Arab and Islamophobic sentiment; and second, a relative dearth of high-quality, in-print, and affordable English translations. Indeed, throughout late nineteenth- and especially early twentieth-century Arabic literary history and criticism, the scholar of the nahḍah encounters Arab self-murder. That the term nahḍah also translates as "awakening" compounds its translational instability. Certainly "awakening" skirts the direct comparison to European history that "renaissance" – a periodization freighted with European historical assumptions and cultural politics – implies.
Original language | English (US) |
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Title of host publication | Arabic Literature for the Classroom |
Subtitle of host publication | Teaching Methods, Theories, Themes and Texts |
Publisher | Taylor and Francis |
Pages | 3-23 |
Number of pages | 21 |
ISBN (Electronic) | 9781315451640 |
ISBN (Print) | 9781138211964 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Jan 1 2017 |