Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 1982. / Vita. Bibliography: leaves [156]-160.

Since the 1990s, a corpus of Arabic literary narratives has appeared that stage Europe from the perspective of forced migrants. This literature on refugees, asylum seekers, and clandestine migrants articulates central problems of migration to Europe in a period of migration policy reform in response to globalization. In this dissertation, I analyze a selection of Arabic and francophone North African literary narratives, including Mahmoud al-Bayaty's 2006 "Dancing on Water", Iqbal Qazwini's 2006 "Zubaida’s Window", Farouq Yousef's 2007 "Nothing and Nobody", Hamid Skif's 2006 "The Geography of Danger", Youssef Fadel's 2000 "Hashish", and Mahi Binebine's 1999 "Welcome to Paradise". This study is situated at the intersection of forced migration studies and Arabic literary studies. As the effort to standardize European migration policy and manage migration has increased states' power to filter and exclude, the human rights framework of migration policy has weakened (Fekete 2009; Menz 2008). Such shifts represent an intensification of what Michel Foucault calls "biopolitics," modern states' propensity to manage populations by producing belonging and exclusion (Foucault 2003). Literature of migration has become an important vehicle for reflecting on the ways that migration policies produce belonging and exclusion in contemporary Europe. Literature of forced migration requires modes of analysis that differ from the more modernist notions of exile that have dominated literary studies (Malkki 1995; McLeod 2000; Parvati 2010). In this study, I draw attention to the ways that literary narratives of migration re-figure Europe as a wilderness. The works that I analyze explore precarious migrant subjectivities through forests, urban jungles, and cannibalism, spaces onto which fantasies (and often nightmares) of the outside of political community can be projected Furthermore, I argue that wilderness provides sites of negotiation between the biopolitical and ideals of rights-based citizenship. While the biopolitical does not serve as a foundation of belonging in these narratives as suggested by some theorists (Agamben 2008), the literature posits new modes of belonging through the very exclusions produced by forced migration. / text

When I decided to produce an edition of Akhbar Siffin I discovered four manuscripts dealing with the historical accounts of the Battle of Siffin. The examination of these four manuscripts showed that they are not the same work; two of them are different copies of Akhbar Siffin. They are Ambrosiana H 129 and Borlin Q.U. 2040. The other two are different copies of the work of Abu Muhammad, Ahmad b. A`tham al-Kufi entitled Waq`at Siffin. They are Ankara, 'Saib 5418 and Mingana Collection, Islam, Arab 572. The next action was to compare the material of Akhbar Siffin with the material of Ibn A'tham's Waq`at Siffin. I concluded that Akhbar Siffin had more original material than Ibn A'tham's Waq'at Siffin and accordingly I decided to edit it. A study of the Ambrosiana Manuscript and the Berlin Manuscript of Akhbar Siffin indicated that the edition would best be based upon the Ambrosiana Manuscript because it has the fuller text and fewer mistakes and gaps than the Berlin Manuscript. The name of the author of Akhbar Siffin does not appear in either of the two manuscripts, and there is no assistance from any other source which may help in identifying him. The introduction of this edition consists of two parts; a bibliographical survey of the, works on the Battle of Siffin and analytical description of the material and the manusoripts of Akhbar Siffin.

In this study on the depiction of the death of the Arab intellectual in elegiac writings since 1967, I examine the ways in which modern and contemporary Arab writers who identify with different literary and historical generations have mourned and commemorated the death of other Arab intellectuals. Drawing on theoretical contributions from psychoanalysis, poststructuralism, and gender studies, particularly those investigating the articulations of masculinity and femininity in mourning practices, I argue that the psychological and political imprints of loss that emerge in the modern and contemporary elegies, eulogies, novels, and memoirs that I analyze, contribute to an elegiac discourse that is melancholic at its core. Both a somber outlook towards the world and a resistance to complete the work of mourning, melancholia, as I interpret it in my analysis of Arabic elegiac writings, is an emotion experienced collectively and subsequently channeled in the literary text. In their elegiac writings, the poets Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008), Samih al-Qasem (b. 1939), Mohammad al-Maghout (1934-2006), and the novelist Jabra Ibrahim Jabra (1919-2004), have expressed a collective disillusionment with the modern role Arab intellectual and his embodiment of his generation’s political and ethical sensibilities following the 1967 war. These writers, I argue, understand the death of their peers as a signifier of their generation’s failure to lead their societies to the socialist and nationalist utopias that they have collectivity imagined. I demonstrate how in their elegiac writings, these poets and novelists in fact lament themselves and the collapse of their own modernist intellectual project in which they had attributed to the written word the power of collective salvation. As I investigate the commemoration of the intellectual in contemporary elegiac texts, I explore the works of young writers such as the Lebanese Rabih Jaber (b. 1974) and the Saudi Seba al-Herz (b. circa 1984). By gradually disengaging from the elegiac modes that their precursors had defined in the 1960s and 1970s, the two novelists have formulated counternarratives of mourning. The narrative that emanates from this literary subversion, I contend, presents a distinctive elegiac rhetoric, in which melancholia ceases to be a collective condition, but rather an individual and intimate state of mind of young protagonists marginalized by and critical of the dominant intellectual circles. / text

This study serves as an introduction to al-Āmidī's critical thought and to one version of a hitherto unpublished section of al-Muwāzana, Cambridge University Library Ms. Qq286 (which is reproduced in anno- tated form, Appendix, D). It also examines some of the main trends in the recent study and evaluation of 'Abbasid criticism,of which al- Muwāzana has, in the Arab world, become a focus. The Appendix (A-C) discusses editions and manuscript versions of the text, providing a reconstruction of the jumbled Ms. Qq286, and concludes that those portions of the work previously considered lost are most probably to be looked for in a different form - that of complementary rather than consecutive texts, fragments of one of which are already available in the footnotes to AZZĀM's standard edition of the Diwan of Abū Tammam; these are examined in some detail. Textual problems are also examined, in the light of related problems of interpretation, in Chapter I, in which the structure of the surviving portions of al-Muwāzana, which has often been considered haphazard, is shown to serve a specific didactic purpose consistent with the details of al-Āmidī's practical criticism. Chapter II_looks at this framework in greater detail, showing to what extent Āmidī is bound by inherited techniques, but also in what ways he succeeds in promoting a novel and rigorous definition of the scope of criticism. Chapter III continues Chapter II's scrutiny of the details of al-Āmidī's critical method, and explores the key element in al-Āmidī's critical thought, the notion of poetry as 'truth'; Chapter IV shows how he attempts to justify this notion in historical terms, and how, in so doing, he succeeds - where Ibn Ṭabāṭabā had earlier failed - in establishing poetic 'truth' as a general concept of some versatility. One of the concerns of Chapters II to IV is thus to reassess al-Āmidī's originality in the light of his transformation of earlier criticism, the nature of his debt to which- has often been misunderstood. The other is to reply to the question raised in the Introduction - what is the value of 'Abbasid criticism? can we afford to neglect it in favour of a direct approach to Arabic poetry? - by contrasting al-Āmidī's conception of the relationship between critic, reader and text with the concerns which dominate Arabic literary studies today. These are shown not to be without weaknesses and inconsistencies; the conclusion suggests that al-Āmidī's concern with poetic 'realism' - a contrast is implied with the current interest in the 'phantastic' and 'baroque' elements in 'Abbasid poetry - might provide fruitful ground for future literary research.

Thesis (mājistīr)--Jāmiʻat Baghdād. / Abstract in English. Includes bibliographical references (p. 525-542) and index.

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This dissertation is a study of Arabic narrative forms and writing practices on the cusp of modernity. It is set in and around the Ottoman provinces of Mount Lebanon, and spans the period from the late-eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century. Through the study of four maqāma collections composed between the 1770s and 1856, this project offers a microhistory of a literary form before and during its earliest encounter with the Nahḍa, or Arab renaissance in the mid-nineteenth century. These highly self-reflexive maqāma collections not only shed light on practices of textuality prior to the spread of print journals and the “new” reading public in the mid-nineteenth century, but also provide an empirical basis for furthering the critique of the centrality of the novel to the definition and periodization of Arabic literary modernity. In its broadest ambition, however, this project is a search for a new theoretical language to describe this maqāma corpus and, through it, key facets of the genre in the modern period.

Bibliography: leaves 199-231. / 231 leaves ; 30 cm. / Title page, contents and abstract only. The complete thesis in print form is available from the University Library. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Adelaide, Dept. of English, 1997

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