How Adab Became Literary: Formalism, Orientalism and the Institutions of World Literature
In: Journal of Arabic LiteratureSearch for other papers by Michael Allan in
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Abstract
Lamenting that “the concept of literary study is broadened . . . so radically that it becomes identical with the whole history of humanity,” René Wellek implores scholars instead to “face the problem of ‘literariness’.” This essay considers Wellek’s formalist conception of literariness alongside what might appear its counterpoint: the historically situated understanding of adab. Just how universal is Wellek’s concept of literariness? In what ways does adab reaffirm or undermine its pertinence across textual traditions? Rather than present Wellek’s formalism and adab as opposites, this essay notes their common grounding in the pedagogical and ethical registers of the term literature—understood less as a canon of texts than as a set of practices and disciplines. Moving between the institutional foundations of modern literary study in Egypt, a footnote from Jirjī Zaydān’s literary history, and reflections on literature by the Orientalist H.A.R. Gibb, the various subsections consider how emergent definitions of literature and adab turn on assertions of how to read, respond and relate to texts. In the end, this shifted emphasis posits world literature less as an amalgam of particular textual traditions than as the disciplines and practices that inscribe how literature comes to matter.
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9
See Paul Starkey, Modern Arabic Literature (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2006), 8-10; Tarif Khalidi, Arabic Historical Thought in the Classical Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 83-181; and Georges Makdisi, The Rise of Humanism in Classical Islam and the Christian West (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 1990), 99-105.
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15
See David Damrosch, What Is World Literature? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003); Pascale Casnova, The World Republic of Letters (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004).
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16
Raymond Schwab, Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s Rediscovery of India and the East 1680-1880 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 8.
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17
See Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); and Maurice Olender The Languages of Paradise (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2003).
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25
Ferial Ghazoul, “Comparative Literature in the Arab World” in Comparative Critical Studies 3: 1-2 (June 2006) 113-124; and Nadia al-Baghdadi, “Registers of Arabic Literary History” in New Literary History 39: 3 (Summer 2008): 437-461.
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28
Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).
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29
Aamir Mufti, “Orientalism and the Institution of World Literatures” in Critical Inquiry 36 (2010): 458-493; and Sheldon Pollock, Language of the Gods in the World of Men (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).
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36
The Egyptian University was founded in 1908, and Jīrjī Zaydan was a key figure in its history. See Donald Reid, Cairo University and the Making of Modern Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
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37
Zaydān (1957), 16.
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39
Zaydān (1957), 16.
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41
Anthony Grafton, The Footnote: A Curious History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).
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42
H.A.R. Gibb, The Legacy of Islam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), 180.
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55
See, for example Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979), and Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). For models of ethical analysis, I refer here to Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993) and Formations of the Secular (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2003), and Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).
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56
Talal Asad, “Anthropological Conceptions of Religion: Reflections on Geertz,” in Man, New Series, 18:2 (June 1983): 237-259.
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58
Saba Mahmood, “Religious Reason and Secular Affect: An Incommensurable Divide” in Critical Inquiry 35 (Summer 2009): 836-862.
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How Adab Became Literary: Formalism, Orientalism and the Institutions of World Literature
In: Journal of Arabic LiteratureSearch for other papers by Michael Allan in
Current site
Google Scholar
PubMed
Abstract
Lamenting that “the concept of literary study is broadened . . . so radically that it becomes identical with the whole history of humanity,” René Wellek implores scholars instead to “face the problem of ‘literariness’.” This essay considers Wellek’s formalist conception of literariness alongside what might appear its counterpoint: the historically situated understanding of adab. Just how universal is Wellek’s concept of literariness? In what ways does adab reaffirm or undermine its pertinence across textual traditions? Rather than present Wellek’s formalism and adab as opposites, this essay notes their common grounding in the pedagogical and ethical registers of the term literature—understood less as a canon of texts than as a set of practices and disciplines. Moving between the institutional foundations of modern literary study in Egypt, a footnote from Jirjī Zaydān’s literary history, and reflections on literature by the Orientalist H.A.R. Gibb, the various subsections consider how emergent definitions of literature and adab turn on assertions of how to read, respond and relate to texts. In the end, this shifted emphasis posits world literature less as an amalgam of particular textual traditions than as the disciplines and practices that inscribe how literature comes to matter.
| All Time | Past 365 days | Past 30 Days | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abstract Views | 841 | 144 | 14 |
| Full Text Views | 179 | 13 | 0 |
| PDF Views & Downloads | 546 | 256 | 18 |