My presentation, " Reading New Novels from Arabia with American Psycho and the Aesthetics of the Negative Sublime" will begin by addressing the failure of the "modernity project" in Arabic literature and will argue that the new wave of writing in Egypt, Morocco, Algeria, Lebanon and Arabia demonstrates another defiance to the modernist aesthetics. In the past decade, Saudi Arabia has witnessed the emergence of many young novelists; more than 200 novels published in Arabia since 2001. In my presentation, I will show how these texts do not coincide with or marvel at similar fictional and philosophical presuppositions as modernist authors; yet to dismiss this new writing as banal or decline is to fail to theorize its significance, and examine the fundamental aesthetic turn in the 21st century Arabic literary scene. How can we read this new flow of novelistic production in Arabia and theorize its aesthetic defiance? How do these writers reject or show the failure of the political and ideological master narrative that has fashioned Arabian society in the last century? Does this writing convey Adorno's "social protest against society"e My paper will address these questions and discuss the surge of this new writing and its anti-modernist aesthetics that is to say negative aesthetics while offering a reading of the negative sublime as a theoretical framework from which I can begin a comparative reading of "American Psycho" with three novels from Arabia, Abdulla Bin Bakhit, The Street of Ataif, Ibrahim Badi, Love in Saudi, and Seba Al-Herz, The Others. Like the American Psycho, these novels caused a stir, provoking scandal and outrage because they deploy confessional language to stage sexual violence, misogyny and boredom. If Bret Easton Ellis in American Psycho displays a "dissenting voice" toward the yuppie society, exposing its cannibalistic desire and moral decay, these young novelists defy and subvert the fictional moral and religious narrative and their texts exhibit a desire for another type of consumption and internalization of the prohibited and outlawed. Likewise, the writing act, the revealing is hinged on violating prohibition and divulging a world of broken ethics. Yet this act of revealing exposes the paradox of normative ideals, pointing to the violence of political and ideological master narrative.

"Historicize or die!" declared Moroccan philosopher Abdallah Laraoui in the wake of the 1967 seatback. Critical history added the humanist Qustantin Zurayq is fundamental for the remaking of a new Arab self. Others followed suit and by the mid 1980s they all shared the diagnosis that Arab publics live ahistorically. But what does it mean to live "outside" history Thinking "with history", that is considering our physical environment, abstract circumstances and even the constitution of the self as a direct outcome of a causal and temporally bound process of development is the most ubiquitous modern habit of mind. By definition, being modern is being historical. With this in mind, I argue that in reaction to the late 20th century crisis historical consciousness, Sonallah Ibrahim's Dhat explores the paradoxes of ahistorical being in a fashion that delineates the contours of a new form of subjectivity. Dhat portrays a close universe in which the protagonists live in an atomized and discontinuous sense of time which does not lend itself to narration, retrospection and critical reflection. Consequently, they can experience the past only metaphysically or subconsciously but not as reservoir of human experience that can shape their lives and those of the community as a whole. Put differently, though the protagonists, work, marry, have children and lead lively social life, their ahisotrical state of being is an inevitably, and quite paradoxically, an isolated one. A key element in forming the novel's theme of ahistorical subjectivity (al-madmun) and exploring this form of isolation, is its unique bifurcated structure (shakl) in which the story of Dhat and that of its greater environment (daily acts of corruption, repression, financial and political scandals) appear in separate consecutive chapters. However, regardless of this structural isolation, Dhat's work in a newspaper's archive (a place which ironically is dedicated to historical memory) grants her daily access to this data. Notwithstanding this fact, she experiences this information as mundane, muted signifiers that prompt apathy and withdrawal rather than action. Taken as a whole, in contrast with previous critics who saw the novel as a piece of "political criticism," I argue that Dhat is first and foremost a courageous existential exploration of life in a post ideological age in which meaningful relationships to anything greater than the ahistorical self become impossible. This is the deep meaning of "living outside history" and the cause for the author's continuous relevance to Arab life.

The Arabic novel has undergone major changes in the last two decades, not only in terms of theme, setting, characterization and literary technique, but also in the range of authors, the variety of represented outlooks, the social and cultural backgrounds of these writers and their distinct understandings of reality and narrative. These changes constitute a radical departure from the established norms and conventions of narrative discourse and present an alarming insight into Arabic culture and psyche, even if they have yet to be subjected to detailed critical scrutiny. The aims of this paper are first to introduce the work of the new wave of young Arab novelists who started publishing in the 1990s and have subsequently become widely known among Arab literary circles as the 1990s generation. Secondly, to outline the context in which they emerged, articulate their vision and consider the changes their cumulative work has introduced into Arabic narrative discourse. Finally, it will identify whether these young writers represent an epistemological or an aesthetic break with previous traditional narrative discourse, and if so, locate this break within the socio-cultural context from which it emerged. The paper deals with a set of homologies, on the one hand there is the new writings and its poetics of a closed horizon, and on the other there are the global changes in which their world, the Arab world at large, is increasingly marginalised; the socio-economic changes, the cultural changes, and the position of those young writers in their culture, and more importantly in the geographical space they occupy. The arrival of the new generation of writers on the cultural scene coincided with major changes to the city of Cairo, and this change left its indelible mark on the novel of the 1990s. In this respect, the paper studies the interaction between the urban changes that took place in Cairo in the last four decades, the kind of 'self' that this change produced, and the transformation of the new texts which emerged from this changing city.

Scholarly investigations of the "digital revolution" (Landow 2006; Liu 2007; Moulthrop 1993) in Anglophone academic circles have often drawn on postmodern theory to analyze the aesthetic and political changes delivered by the internet. For example, it is usually argued that Barthes' notion of the "readerly text," or Foucault's decentering of the author function, are now manifest in the very structure of hypertext. Such pronouncements by anglophone academics establish these theorists as intellectual icons, reinforcing the division of labor between the production of "theory" on the one hand and the "aesthetic work" on the other. In some academic studies of literature, this distinction, largely a result of print-based culture, often maps onto a distinction between West and East as well: the former located as the source of theory, and the latter as the source of literary artifacts. What local significations might these same theorists acquire in the Arabic blogosphere? In this paper, I investigate the references to and appropriation of postmodern cultural icons from Derrida to Lyotard in the Egyptian blogosphere. Specifically, I focus on the writings of blogger Ahmed Naje, who makes frequent reference to French post-structuralists in his theorizations of the experience of literary blogging. In Naje's digital literary productions, such as blog posts, PDF "dossiers", and uploaded novels, one finds Bourdieu juxtaposed with Egyptian rapper/actor Ahmad Makki, and Lyotard set along side Michael Jackson. I argue that these theorists, rather than being raised to the level of academic stardom, are cast among American and Egyptian pop artists as the many cultural icons of the digital age, blurring the distinction between "theory" and "aesthetic work", European theorist and commercial artist. In maintaining a very ambivalent attitude towards the institutions of print culture, and the fetishized commodification of the literary work, Naje at once preserves these icons for the new hypertextual world, while re-evaluating their relative authority to speak for the blogging experience. This paper is an attempt to interrogate the Eurocentric hold on theorizations of aesthetic changes in internet, with its distinction between hermeneutics and the literary object.