The term “world literature,” famously coined by the German poet Goethe in the early nineteenth century, envisions an assemblage of European nations that find self-expression in aesthetically defined forms of composition – poetry, drama and fiction. These works find their origin and continued sustenance in the classics of ancient Greek literature. What was regarded as Oriental literature was given a place in this order, but as an exotic, terminal branch that is of interest only in its instances that are palatable to Romantic aesthetic values. Nevertheless, world literature was conceived as an ideal unity of imaginative expression, an epitome of humanism. As this framework of world literature and its norms became dominant in Europe, intellectuals emerged in other areas who accepted these norms and sought to promote them among their countrymen. In the Arabic context, devotees of Arabic poetry were reluctant to accept the prestige and literary norms of European works and thus posed an obstacle to the formation of an Arabic national literature that could take its place in world literature. Two ambitious works published in Cairo in 1904 attempted to placate Arab resistance to European literary standards by recasting the Arabic poetic heritage as central to world literature. Sulayman al-Bustani’s monumental translation of the Iliad, with its extensive literary historical introduction and copious commentary, presented this epic as the European twin of pre-Islamic Arabic poetry. Rawhi al-Khalidi’s book on Victor Hugo depicted the celebrated French poet and putative founder of Romanticism as the heir of a European poetic tradition originating in Islamic Spain. Al-Bustani’s and al-Khalidi’s works introduce the genres and aesthetic values of the Eurocentric framework of world literature in ways that enable the fashioning of an Arabic national literature that can fit into this order. Yet at the same time, they compensate for their subordination of Arabic to the canons of world literature by establishing an authorial position for Arabic in the structure and formation of these canons. They create a new version of world literature in which Arabic plays a central role. In this way, we see in the works of al-Bustani and al-Khalidi that the assimilation of Arabic, and presumably other non-Western literary traditions, into the universal framework of world literature, involved not only the recasting of the premodern literary heritage and its values, but the production of a national version of the universal framework as well.

Lamia Ziadé's Bye Bye Babylon: Beirut 1975-1979 (2011) is an illustrated memoir originally published in French and translated into English. The book includes a sparse autobiographical narrative, archival materials and original artwork that represents Lebanon in the 1970s. Like other 21st century Arab diaspora narratives of the civil war, such as Rawi Hage's novel Dinero's Game (2006) and Wajdi Mouwad's play Incendies (2003), Bye Bye Babylon portrays the Lebanese situation within a global cultural and political frame. While Bye Bye Babylon evokes the national context largely through a set of autobiographical nostalgic recollections, Ziadé's memoir depicts globality through stylized images of commodities, ranging from imported foods to imported weapons. Bye Bye Babylon recaptures the materiality of daily life, but often through pastiche, which is its principal technique. The book is nostalgic in its title, which bids farewell to and also brings forth that lost place of memory that perhaps was only ever a myth. Furthermore, the nostalgia of the graphic memoir is inflected with political irony that finds expression in the contrasting forms of the narration, as the book moves between Ziade's account of her subjective childhood memories of family life during the war (the national) and her more objective factual cataloguing of weapons, militias, personalities and events (the global). This unusual book is situated in the spaces between Arab and World Literatures. This paper argues that Ziadé's appeal to nostalgia in the genre of the memoir operates within a familiar and romantic national discourse on Lebanon that is complicated and critiqued by the representation of the cosmopolitan consumerism of Beirut's violent urban culture in the 1970s, which is itself an effect of globalization.

THE READER AND THE REGION: THE ARAB INTELLECTUAL IN A WORLD LITERATURE FRAME World literature criticism from its beginnings a little over a decade ago has shown a particular attitude toward the reading process. David Damrosch claims, for example, that a reading method that thinks simultaneously about the original context of a literary work and its point of reception can help define the field, whereas, Franco Moretti makes what he calls "distant reading" central to his argument for criticism untethered by old nationalist categories. Even Pacale Casanova makes reading transcendent in her The World Republic of Letters by presenting an expansive system of authors from varied regions and epochs without ever mentioning critics or theorists, leaving their important role in the circulation and reception of literary works across borders transcendent in its invisibility. The connecting thread in these approaches is the emphasis on reading, but not readers. These methods can be contrasted with the focus--often quite critical--on embodied intellectuals who navigate their geohistorical situation and incorporate social implication at the same time that they carry out the task of reading. Abdallah Laroui's The Crisis of the Arab Intellectual: Traditionalism or Historicism? occupies a central place in this bibliography and is distinguished by its Janus-faced critique of Orientalist reading, implicated as it is in colonial politics, and of regional thinkers, struggling against the binary choices of approaches that are either derivative or traditionalist. Other North African and Arab intellectuals (Hichem Djait, Mohamed Abed al-Jabari, Fatima Mernissi, Edward Said) work from versions of this critical approach, diverse in their goals and emphases, but sharing a keen concern with the question of where the reader is reading and what commitments she manifests. This Laroui influenced genealogy exposes the dimension of world literature criticism that has refused to globalize: the dimension of theory, reading, and method. It suggests, as well, the possibility of a more global method that would begin with asking who is reading and from where, incorporating an embodied reader back into the world of -systems and republics.

Sonallah Ibrahim’s 1988 novel, Beirut, Beirut, presents a paradigmatic case of failed cultural translation challenging the emergent consensus among the standard bearers of “world literature”: Casanova, Damrosch, Moretti and even late comers such as the Warwick Research Collective (WREC), who resurrect a form of marxist determinism as universality. Upon its publication in English translation (2015), reviews uniformly panned Beirut, Beirut for its clumsy narrative structure, which, so we are told, sacrifices the dramatic drive of plot to journalistic didacticism and dull historical facts. Yet, for readers aware of literary and cultural networks of reference, Beirut, Beirut sparks laughter and bitter appreciation with its veiled references to Egyptian film noir (Bab el hadid 1958), U.S. hardboiled fiction (Chandler/Hammett/Himes), and the French nouveau roman. At issue, it seems, is the novel’s extreme practice of ekphrasis/wasf or verbal sketch of a silent object, here, the scene-by-scene description of an epic documentary of the Palestinian revolution that is the only job an itinerant and cynical Egyptian journalist and would-be novelist can find in the Beirut of 1980. Reading only for the colorful depiction of a known reality, the anglophone reviews intuitively assert what the gatekeepers of world literature “know”: novels of the global south must offer snapshots of tragic realities. Against the grain of this market sensibility, Ibrahim crafts a literary text that plays upon the affective knowledge of a reader engaged in and by the text. This, in turn, requires a theory of the affective relation to the extensive ekphrasis that envelops the narrator and reader alike. Beirut, Beirut demands a theory of reading as an engagement with: nationalist (a)morality; genre literature; and the militant politics of the image. Unlike the social realism of his longer works, Beirut, Beirut uses ekphrasis to reflect on our ruined postcolonial fate where political morality travels along the axis of description created by a character so empty he fails to “comment” at all: allegory of the Arab subject of biopolitics whether citizen, exile or refugee? Stasis as civil war (Loraux) finds its contemporary expression not in the events narrated but in static description drained even of the power of lament. Ibrahim’s novel enacts the call for aesthetic education