This paper will address the work of the contemporary Iraqi author Muḥammad Khuḍayyir (b. 1942), whose literary output consists primarily of enigmatic short stories and essayistic pieces that combine elements of fiction, memoir, and literary criticism. A life-long resident of Basra, Khuḍayyir frequently evokes the city in his writings, either by relating or re-imagining forgotten incidents from its past or by referring to a narrator’s own memories. He has also created a fictional counterpart for Basra—an identical twin known as Basrayatha, which first appeared as the subject of his 1993 novel of the same name. Basrayatha also appears in his more recent stories, which seem to share the same fictional universe. I argue that Khuḍayyir’s evocation of the local is part of his literary project to create an “imagined community” of readers. As a Iraqi writer who has refused to abandon his city through eight years of the Iran-Iraq War, the First Gulf War, the sanctions era, and the years of violence and uncertainty in the wake of the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq, Khuḍayyir understandably seeks refuge in the local and the past in the face of a public sphere characterized by decades of violence and authoritarianism. In contrast to the often heavy-handed social realist mode that marked Iraqi literature in the 1950s and 1960s, Khuḍayyir’s ambiguous, labyrinthine fiction—often drawing on elements of magical realism, surrealism, and science fiction—is constructed so as to maximize the participation of the reader in creating literary meaning. In this light, Khuḍayyir’s stories can be usefully examined through the lens of reader response theory, as developed in the writings of Stanley Fish and others. By framing Khuḍayyir’s texts as a structure that invites the reader to assist in the construction of meaning—even if the reader’s responses are guided by the structures the author has laid out—it is possible to see his writings as a call to envision alternatives to contemporary reality.

The public discontent with which the work of Muḥammad Aḥmad Khalafallah (1916-1998) was met points to an ongoing crisis in modern Arabic literary thought. This paper will examine the critical deadlock that resulted in the expulsion of Khalafallah and the demonization of his scholarship on the Qur'an, with particular reference to his controversial dissertation, al-Fann al-Qaṣaṣi fī al-Qur’ān (1947/8) [Narrative Art in the Qur'an]. I specifically investigate the "jargon of authenticity" responsible for the rebuttal of critical method. Examining the principles of his theoretical approach to narrative logic in the Qur'an, I will argue that ultimately the matter of Khalafallah, like that of Ṭāhā Ḥusayn before him, marks a dilemma in Arabic literary critique: a conflict of priorities between hegemonic and counter-hegemonic critique, in which the former dismisses the latter as dialectical practice in atheism which can readily be dismissed once the serious guards of Islamic faith allude to it. Some of the questions this paper poses include the following: what are the intellectual grounds that make literary criticism particularly dangerous or sacrilegious? If Khalafallah’s case is intensified by by scholarly dislocation and intellectual alienation, how does his work enable us to rethink the modalities of modern Arabic literary criticism vis-à-vis tradition?

My paper will show how Ṭā’ir al-Kharāb by ᶜabd al-RRab Sarūrī uses narrative to deconstruct and dismantle the political oppressive regimes in Yemen through a heart breaking love story between an immigrant Yamani professor, Nashwān, who works and resides in France and a Yamani student, Ilhām, whom he met in a conference in France. The love relationship is told in a way that unveils and chronicles the cruel life that they have experienced in Yemen which has forced both of them to leave. In telling Nashwān about her traumatizing being, Ilhām uncovers the fact that she was raped by her father, Sheikh al-qabīlah, who later forced her to marry someone she did not want to marry who was also abusive. This Sheikh, Ta’ir al-kharāb, and the abusive husband, I will argue, are different faces for the same person, the dictator. The novel focuses on the traumatic impact of the dictatorship on the female body, and by a means of allegory on the body of the nation, as exemplified by the character Ilhām. The juxtaposition of both the story of the raped female body and the rape of the nation by the dictator, who is referred to throughout the novel as Ṭā’ir al-Kharāb (the bird of destruction) as well as Sheikh al-qabīlah (the tribal sheikh), will be read as an anguished cry for normalcy sought by not only women in Yemen but all the nation. Exploring the female body in sexual encounters interspersed throughout the novel echo, for the sake of unveiling and violently exposing, the discourse of Arab dictatorships in relation to the body. In Tā’ir al-Kharāb there is an obvious gendered reproduction of the nation. My goal in this chapter is to analyze the ways in which the novel has chosen to represent the dictator’s power. I am aware that my reading may sound treacherous given the polemic exchange between Aijaz Ahmad and Fredric Jameson over the latter's formulation of what he terms “national allegory”. However, such an approach, I would argue, enables us to see how the agony of dictatorship reinforces the trauma of the besieged female body which consequently becomes the site of struggle for its freedom.

While feminist theorists have recognized the significance of the mother daughter relationship, this relationship has remained largely neglected in studies of autobiography of Arab women. This paper examines the mother-daughter relationship in autobiographies/ memoirs by Arab women writers who identify themselves, and are recognized publicly, as feminists. In Nawal El Saadawi’s A Daughter of Isis: The Autobigraphy of Nawal El Saadawi (Zed Books 1999), Leila Ahmed’s A Border Passage: From Cairo to America—A Woman’s Journey (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999), Fatima Mernissi’s Dreams of Trespass: Memoir of a Harem Girlhood (Perseus Books 1994) and Jean Said Makdisi’s Teta, Mother and Me: An Arab Woman’s Memoir (Saqi 2005) daughters represent their mothers in different ways in their effort to construct their feminist selves in a patriarchal society. Some do so by rejecting their mothers as role models in their attempt to surpass them. In El Saadawi’s case, the author is so eager to contest the traditional concept of femininity expected of middle class Egyptian women that she present a condescending portrait of her mother that completely silences the voice of the latter and denies her subjectivity. Ahmed does something similar: identifying with her professional, western-educated father, the author, who is brought up in an upper class Egyptian household and who culturally identifies with Europe, distances herself from an Arabic-speaking mother with whom she literally does not have a shared language. Ahmed’s tenuous connection with the mother results in her total alienation from Arabic, her “mother” tongue and from her Arab identity more generally. Unlike El Saadawi and Ahmed, Mernissi and Makdisi self-consciously identify with their mothers and use their memoirs to actively investigate and reclaim their mothers’ heritage and their own relationship to modernity. Mernissi presents a portrait of a mother who, in her subtle ways, rebelled against confinement and the veil and planted the first feminist seeds in her young daughter, a daughter who ends up embracing modernity as a path for Muslim women’s liberation. Makdisi, on the other hand, uses her memoir to interrogate her liberal feminist views that modernity advanced women’s lives and to inscribe in her text her mother’s and grandmother’s histories and voices. By critically examining these feminists’ representations of their mothers, the paper sheds light on a neglected aspect of Arab women autobiography and complicates the relationship of Arab feminism and modernity-a relationship that continues to be a site of contestation and conflict.

In 1912, the Ottoman-Palestinian intellectual Muhammad Ruhi al-Khalidi published a signed second edition of _Tarikh 'Ilm al-Adab 'ind al-Ifrinj wa-l-'Arab_ (History of the Discipline of Literature Among the Franks and the Arabs), first serialized in 1902-1903 and published as an unsigned monograph in 1904. This early Arabic foray into modern comparative literature prefigures Erich Auerbach's _Mimesis_ (1946) in framing comparison itself as the work of migration and estrangement. Exiled in Istanbul, Auerbach would lament his need to render a comparison of Western literatures from a memory supposedly unaided by European libraries--yet concede that he might never have undertaken such a study at home. Al-Khalidi's expatriation in Bordeaux, "far from the Oriental libraries where the necessary documents are located," similarly fetters yet inspires his efforts to reconstruct an intertwined history of French and Arabic literatures. Tracing al-Khalidi's translational theories of literary language to his peregrinations (1890s-1908) between provincial centers and imperial capitals (Jerusalem to Istanbul, where he met Ottoman translators of French literature; Istanbul to Paris, where he revisited the Qur'an, Arabic literature, and Arab-Islamic history under French Orientalist tutelage; Paris to Bordeaux, where he served as consul-general of the Ottoman Empire), I read _'Ilm al-Adab_ as testimony both to the translational comparatism of the nineteenth-century Arab literary "renaissance" and to the estrangement that such a consciousness induces in literary Arabic itself. Insofar as al-Khalidi premises a properly "civilized" modern literature on clear language--on what he calls "the exact correspondence of signifier [_lafz_] to signified [_ma'na_] in every dimension"--he denounces both the rhyme and the polysemy characteristic of postclassical Arabic prose and calls on Arabic to approximate the languages of modern Europe (French) and of a Eurasia fast modernizing along "Western" lines (Ottoman Turkish). In so doing he alienates modern Arabic language and literature from the sonic and semantic play--and interplay--of their past. Al-Khalidi, I argue, suggests that Arabic cannot be "modern" without becoming comparable--that is, without submitting its conventions to French and Ottoman arbiters of linguistic modernity.