1,,,,11 / ,111111o/Alif34: Andrew N. Rubin (Georgetown University)

hltto1 . Feria! J. Ghazoul

1\ 1 '"' 11111 · hhtor: h/11111111/ Manager:

/•',/1/111111/ Al'sista/lfs:

Mohammed Birairi

Walid El Hamamsy

Fatirna-al-zahraa Ahmad Ramy & Hosam Nayil

hlitoriol Advisors (alphabetically by last name):

0111aima Abou Bakr (Cairo University)

( ialal Amin (American University in Cairo)

()aber Asfour (Cairo University)

Mohammed Berrada (University of Mohamed V)

Ccza Kassem Draz (American University in Cairo and Cairo University)

Sabry Hafez (SOAS: University of London and Qatar University)

Barbara Harlow (University of Texas)

Wolfhart Heinrichs (Harvard University)

Richard Jacquemond (University of Aix-Marseille)

As'ad Khairallah (American University of Beirut)

Andrew N . Rubin (Georgetown University)

Doris l\nright Clark Shoukri (American University in Cairo)

1 loda Wasfi (J\in Shams University)

!ht /11//011 •1ng 11eople lu11•e participated in the preparation o,fthis issue:

< 'l1w, Ahani, Fadwa AbdelRahrnan, Cherif Abdullah, Randa

Al11nil1ak1, Mohamed Agina, Ola El Aguizy, Mona Baker, Elliott

< 'olla , 11 a Dworkin, Kevin Dwyer, Sharif Elmusa, Hoda Elsadda, May

I '.11011k , I lala Halim, Michel Hebert, Abdullah Ibrahim, Areeg

ll11al11111 , Salima Ikram, Rasha Ismail, Abbas J. Kdaimy, Mieke Kolk,

S11sa11 Kollin, Fatma Massoud, Gharaa Mehanna, Sarnia Mehrez,

William Mclaney, Iman Mersal, Dalia Mostafa, Arny Motlagh,

Scnayon Olaoluwa, Coflin Parson, Catherine Porter, Nicole Rizzuto,

Mounira Soliman, Steffen Stelzer, John Swanson, Marlous Willemsen,

Nicol ien Zu ijdgeest.

Cover illustration courtesy of Dia Al-Azzawi. Printed with permission.

0 2014 Department of English and Comparative Literature. AUC.

Distributed by AUC Press.

Dar L'I Kutub No . 5318/ 14

ISHN <)78977<l16 <178)

ISSN 1110 X<in

Contents

English Section

Editorial ............................................................................................... 8

Sabry Hafez: World Literature After Orientalism: The Enduring Lure of the Occident. ........................................................................ 10

Joseph R. Slaughter: World Literature as Property .......................... 39

Benjamin H. Ogden: Quantum Criticism: A Poetics of Simultaneity for Global Literature ................................................................. 74

Brian Doherty: The Center Cannot Hold: The Development of World Literature Anthologies ........................................... .100

Barbara Lekatsas: La pensee de midi: Mediterranean Cosmopolitanism in the Work of Camus, Cavafy, and Chahine ......................... 125

Gretchen Head: Confronting the Right-Thinking Bourgeoisie: Shukri, Genet, and a Poetics oflnversion ............................... 151

Hala Ghoneim: Imagined Audience and the Reception of World Literature: Reading Brooklyn Heights and Chicago ................................. .174

Haifa Saud Alfaisal: World Reading Strategies:Border Reading Bandar shah ........................................................................... . 199

Anouar El Younssi: An Exoticized World Literature: Ben Jelloun at the Two Shores of the Mediterranean ................................. 225

English Abstracts of Articles ......................................................... 251

English Notes on Contributors ...................................................... 259

Arabic Section

Editorial ............................................................................................... 8

Dia Al-Azzawi: Plastic Art Intertwined with World Literature: An Iraqi Testimony .................................................................. 10

Ziad Elmarsafy: World Literature and the Worldliness of Literature .. .27

Mohammad Salama: World Literature Between Center and Margin: A Reading of Postcolonial Arabic Literature ........................... 42

Samia Mehrez: Mapping the Novel: Moretti and the Re-making of Literary History .................................................................... 67

Erich Auerbach: Philologie der Weltliteratur

(Translated and Introduced by Hala Farrag) .......................... 93

Wen-chin Ouyang: lntertextuality and Transformation: Collective Memory in Chinese and Arabic Historical Novels ................................ 109

Esraa Shammari: World Visions on "Strange(r)ness": Wadih Saadeh's

Poetry as an Example ............................................................. 136

Maisa Alkhawaja: Mythical Elements and Existential Questioning in Darwish's Jidariyya ........................................................... 163

Fayza Haikal: The Contribution of Pharaonic Literature to World Culture (lntervie\v) .................................................................................................... 195

Arabic Abstracts of Articles .......................................................... 228

Arabic Notes on Contributors ....................................................... 235

World Likl'11C11n•: l't•1.,111·dht•<; ancl lkhaks

Andn•w N. R11hl11

While Weltliteratur has always n.:111a111cd al lhl' L'L'llll'r or the disci­pline of comparative literature, with the publica11011 ol Franco Moretti's Graphs, Maps, Trees, Pascale Casanova's 171e World Rc{J11hlic (!/Letters, and David Damrosch's What is World Litera11m!'! Weltlitcratur has emerged from its silent center to explicitly redefine the aims, intentions, and practices of comparative literature. Whether Weltliteratur is viewed as a conceptual organization, as Moretti and Casanova understand it, or as a body of literary texts that circulate beyond its origins, as Damrosch does, we cannot overlook the powerful global relations that Weltliteratur both relies upon for its articulation and conceals.

A concept first expressed by Johann Wolfgang Goethe in 1827, Weltliteratur does not refer to a collection of world masterpieces; rather, as Goethe used it, it referred to the emerging modes of articu­lation through which the nations of Europe communicated and estab­lished the grounds for mutual understanding and co-existence. In the German Romantic tradition in which Goethe wrote, Weltliteratur was never meant to suggest the full and complete realization of a universal literature, since, as Erich Auerbach later observed, if such understand­ing were to be attained, there would be no need for Weltliteratur, and the concept itself would be abolished.

Many of the recent and rather original and elegant models that conceive of the evolution and development of Weltliteratur have, how­ever, largely departed from Goethe's ideal of mutual understanding. Among the two most theoretically sophisticated and influential accounts, Moretti's and Casanova's have, for example, placed a great deal of emphasis on the conditions that determine the emergence of world liter­ature. As part of a general attempt to provide a theory that offers a uni­fied account of the evolution of literary forms, these ambitious studies are, however, driven by a yearning for totality, a desire to provide a total literary history, une histoire tout court. As a result, the relationship between the overlapping aspects and the intermingling of cultures those mutually shared and discrepant experiences that arc till' basis Im till' pro­duction of new modes of mutual understandi111• :111d t·111•\1-.1c11n· a1L' undl'rmincd . A significant amount of tlK·11n·l1t ill""" tit.ii d1 H lnpt•d 111 thl' wal..L· of Said's Ori<•1110/i.1·111 and ('11/11111 • 1111,/ ll1111, ·111tl11w 1., ' "'-t' lltlill I dl\1111ss1·d. 11i:11·11 111al11L'd , 11 11Hlll'd , 111 1111 '""' 11 I Ii• 1111i q111 l.il11111 nl

111hc1 cultures is seen to operate within the realm of an ahistorical vacu-11111 one that is pliable enough to permit interpretation to stand for a uni ll'l'-alism devoid of any real social attachment.

Indeed, one of the main characteristics of the practice of study ol Wcltliteratur is its ironic dependence on an often unquestioned 11111nolingualism. In Moretti's elaboration of his claim that novels "in lhL' periphery of the literary system" depend on a compromise between Wl'slcrn technique and "local material," he turns to sources written in a medium (English)-inherently foreign to the local materials - that hl' secs combining unequally with the Western narrative conventions lhal arc imported into the periphery. What is perplexing is not only how this problem relies upon second-hand sources in English, but also l1nw it inscribes the very Anglo-centric assumptions upon which the -.d1olarship rests. Of all the eighteen critics Moretti cites, only two arc 1 1ll'd in languages other than English.

As one of the first non-European journals to critically address lhc category of Weltliteratur bilingually from the perspective of thl' < i luhal South, this special issue of Al if addresses this problem theorcl ll all y and empirically. The critical conversation about the problem ol lhl' catl'gory of Weltliteratur is not only extended beyond the h1mpcan and North American sphere that has largely dominated and I ramcd the discussion of Weltliteratur, but is juxtaposed formally in a way lhal permits us to understand that there are other "world lill'r:l · 11111·s" that allow us lo reexamine the contending theories, practil'L's , ;11111 underlying assumptions of Weltliteratur. Essays in this volu1111• 1'111phasi/e in different ways the inherent tension between postcolonial -.111d1l's and "world criticism," and to that extent open up new realms lw lhl' discovery of new knowledges, new epistemes, modes of con \l'lsation, and communication because, after all, there is no cullurl' I hal dues not overlap with another, however asymmetrical they arc .

1\lt/, a rl'l'crccd 111ul1ilingual journal appearing annually in llll' -. p1111 ~· , prl'sl'nts ~111iclcs in Arabic, l ~ nglish. and , occasionally. Frl'ncll . I ht· dll krcnl traditions and languages conl'ronl and complcml'nl L'ach

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