Thesis (Th.M.)--Dallas Theological Seminary, 2008. / Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [53]-61).

<p> This dissertation examines the theme of strangeness in Arabic and Latin American literature between 1880 and 1920. Through analytical readings of novels and other prose fiction of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, I show the salience of strangeness, alienation and estrangement as motifs in these works. In the first chapter of the dissertation, I examine earlier works of prose to provide context. In the second chapter, I focus on strangeness as manifested through sexual transgression. Finally, in the last chapter, I analyze narratives of physical estrangement, such as travel, urban alienation, and disconnect from nature. </p><p> In analyzing strangeness, I show its close relationship with modernity. Indeed, alienation is a hallmark of modernity, rising from a disconnect with one&rsquo;s society and physical environment. Alienation and estrangement are also metaphorical ways of addressing the relationship with the Other, especially if that Other is a colonizer or ex-colonizer. Strangeness is therefore expressive of problematics of national identity, at a time of budding decolonization and post-colonial nation-building. </p><p> Finally, this dissertation shows how the early prose literature of the turn of the twentieth century, in Latin America and in the Arab world, has expressed essential anxieties of modernity, and set the course for the canonical works of the later twentieth century.</p><p>

The objective for this dissertation is twofold: I first examine how the Israeli poet Rahel Bluvshtain-Sela (1890-1931) reclaimed the Hebrew language of the Bible in order to create a Modern Hebrew vernacular. I then evaluate Rahel's creative strategies in light of her contribution to Hebrew poetry and Israeli culture that has evolved since her death more than seventy years ago. My study focuses on the biblical intertextuality in Rahel's poems. In particular, I examine Rahel's creative use of biblical allusions, and the complex ways in which she reflects on and connects with historic memory. This strategy allowed the poet to express her intensely personal experiences in the present as they reflected on a new collectivity. By reclaiming the Hebrew language, which until her time was primarily associated with the religious sphere, this pioneering intellectual integrated the practical aspects of everyday life into both her language and her poetry. My dissertation work integrates hermeneutic literary analysis, as well as analyses of intertextuality, literary history, and translation to explore the relationship between ancient and modern Hebrew in Rahel's poetry. My project is complicated by the fact that I translate a poet who wrote in a fresh new language, one that had not been spoken colloquially for hundreds of years—indeed, Rahel herself was translating from ancient Hebrew into a developing new language. The first chapter of this dissertation is an introduction of my project as well as an overview of Rahel's status as a poet. The second chapter provides an intellectual biography of Rahel, introducing her life in light of her intellectual background and context. This chapter thus goes beyond traditional biographical readings of Ra hel that focus on her personal life, particularly her romantic relationships, and her illnesses and depressions, while removing her from the social context and community in which she lived—a community that she played a key role in creating through her poetry. For the third chapter, I selected poems from Rahel's work that serve as examples for the way in which the poet positioned biblical texts within the new context of the emerging state of Israel. The poems are grouped by sub-topics: (1) Personalities as Destinies—The Bible as the Intimate Other, (2) Writing the Land as Desire, and (3) Between Ideology as Identity and Sense of Self. In order to show Rahel's use of intertextuality with the biblical idiom and content, I introduce each of her poems in the original Hebrew, in English transliteration, and also provide my own translations. The biblical sources are identified, traced and cited at the beginning of each poem analysis. I then provide an extensive prose analysis of each poem in which I analyze the biblical allusions as palimpsestic references that are used to retain the trace of biblical history within a new Hebrew language. The analyses offer a literal interpretation of the poem interwoven with an explanatory discussion, focusing on the biblical themes and language that appear in each poem. Such detailed examination of the selected poems will present Rahel's personal and unique approach to the biblical text, an approach that grasps the Bible not only in a metaphoric way, but also with the intention to highlight collective memories. The final chapter focuses on the popular reception of Rah el's poetry, and is a mosaic reflecting Rahel's influence on the Hebrew language and culture. The section's pieces come from different areas of Israeli life: contemporary poetry, literature and songs, as well as from literary reviews, folklore/cultural features and political editorials in newspapers. The purpose of this look at snapshots of contemporary Hebrew language and Israeli culture will reveal the effectiveness of Ra hel's palimsestic writing strategies for the complex negotiations of personal, spatial and national identities.

This study investigates the reading and studying of Arabic literature in U.S. collegiate education as a site for engagement with alterity. The purpose is to explore how students in foreign language (FL) literature courses encounter alterity, how they construct the other and reconstruct themselves as they read modern Arabic literary texts, and how the political, historical, geographical, and cultural contexts in which students read shape their reading. Using ethnographic methods, I examine an Arabic literature U.S. collegiate class that I created and taught. Data sources include audio recordings of class discussions, audio recording of out-of-class discussion groups with students, researcher’s memos after classes and out-of-class discussion sessions, in-depth interviews of students, qualitative analysis of students’ written work. Witnessing the growing movement of literacy-based approaches to foreign language education, I use theories of alterity as a framework to illuminate understanding of literacy in foreign language contexts and possibly engender an other-oriented literacy. Notions of alterity that constitutes my theoretical framework are synthesized through analyses of Levinas’s ethics of alterity and post-colonial conceptualization of alterity, supporting my investigation of the consumption of Arabic literature in the Western Academy (Huggan, 2002). The post-colonial lens enables me to interpret the construction of the self and the other through the act of reading within its specific historical, cultural and political contexts (Drabinski, 2011). Building on the works of scholars using Levinas’s ethics to theorize an ethical reading (Attridge, 2004a; Cohen, 2004; Davis, 2010; Tarc, 2015), my theoretical framework envisions an ethical textual engagement with the literary work. Participants of the study encountered different aspects of alterity when reading and studying Arabic literary works, and each aspect posed a different challenge to them. Through the encounter with the alterity of the literary works, the Arabic language and their peers, participants were challenged to rethink their habitual modes of thinking, (Attridge, 2004a), to be open to different interpretation and be uncertain about their own, to embrace their differences (Biesta, 2004), to rely on and be responsible for each other, and learn from each other (Todd, 2003) and to produce knowledge in conversation with an other (Katz, 2013). In their reading, participants encountered cultural distance with the literary works (Attridge, 2011) both close and far and made efforts to account for it. The study demonstrates how alterity as a framework in FL literature class can create opportunities for students to ethically respond to literary works and to each other and engage in learning as a transformative experience of encountering otherness.

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The Political Aesthetic of the Medieval Persian Prison Poem, 1100-1200 traces the dissemination of the medieval Persian prison poem (habsiyyat) from South Asia to the Caucasus in the context of the contemporaneous developments in literary and political theory that shaped this genre. Varying attitudes towards figuration in Persian literary criticism are examined in terms of an aesthetics of incarceration that, I argue, extended the political boundaries of medieval Persian literary culture. Drawing on the pioneering works of Zafari (1985) and Akimushkina (2006), I elucidate the prison poem's strategies for making the medieval experience of incarceration available to literary representation. In documenting the dialectic between the sultan's material power and the poet's discursive sovereignty, I show how medieval Persian prison poetry critically engaged with medieval punitive practices. Ultimately, this dissertation traces the relation between the increased use of incarceration as a mode of punishment by regional sultanates and the discursive elevation of poetry that is Persian literature's greatest contribution to world literature. Concomitantly with investigating the twelfth-century aesthetics of incarceration, this dissertation documents how twelfth-century Persian poetry was transformed by idioms of literary knowledge articulated through a Persianized Arabo-Islamic rhetoric. Exegeses of specific prison poems by Mas'ud Sa'd Salman of Lahore (d. 1121), Khaqani Shirwani (d. 1199), and of other prison poets from these regions, are offered alongside documentary explorations into the status of non-Muslim minorities in Saljuq domains, the transformation of a predominantly panegyric genre into an instrument of political critique, and demonstrate the political importance of the habsiyyat to the historiography of incarceration as well as of Persian literature. By examining the literary archive of incarceration from Lahore in South Asia to Shirwan in the Caucasus, this study aims to expand the scope of investigations into the aesthetics of power as registered by literary form, to extend the temporal dimensions of the historiography of incarceration, and to contribute to classical Persian literary theory's conceptualization of genre. Chapter one offers a synoptic and global history of incarceration in the medieval world. Chapter two considers what the prison poem as a genre has to offer global literary theory. Chapter three studies the complex modulation of the qasida form through the prison poem's emphasis on the poet's lyric subjectivity. Chapter four traces the appropriation of the motifs of prophecy by Persian prison poets who aspired for a sovereignty that exceeding the boundaries of material power. Chapter five offers detailed exegeses of the two most significant texts in the medieval Persian archive of incarceration: Khaqani's Christian qasida and his qasida on the ruins of Mada'in. Chapter six documents the devolution of authority onto prison poetry and the reconstitution of material power through discursive sovereignty. Collectively, these chapters show that, just as medieval Persian prison poets protested the terms of their social contracts and thus suffered imprisonment, so did the prison poem genre contest the distribution of sovereignty in the medieval world by transferring prophecy, and prophecy's concomitant authority, to the poet.

A comparative study of Arabic and Turkish literary modernity, this dissertation investigates the rhetoric of authority in Ottoman-Arab and -Turkish literary, literary-historical, and literary critical discourses in the nineteenth century. Bringing together examples of travelogue, fiction, literary history and criticism, I attend to the divided and divisive figures of the sovereign and the author in order to examine the crises and transformations of political and literary authority in this period. Through an extended conversation with the recent historiography of the late-Ottoman Empire, I illustrate how the divisions and dispersions of the author’s body in these texts mirror the diffusion, dispersion, and dissipation of sultanic sovereignty, slowly being disembodied from the Sultan’s body, and how this pairing, in turn, testifies to the contradictions that inhere in the emergent possibilities of popular, political and literary, representation. Juxtaposing (de)formations and representations of sovereign bodies with contemporary (de)constructions of authorial bodies, I claim that certain theological and political aspects associated with the sultan’s body henceforth come to be taken up by the body of the author. It is the concurrent excess and deficiency of this transfer and translation—and the force and weakness that is at once associated with the act of writing—that defines the modern crisis of representation. To make sense of the institution of modern literature in Arabic and Turkish—and of other new modalities of political and cultural representation—it is necessary to attend to the crises of late-Ottoman sovereignty, as well as to the avenues of enchantment and disenchantment thereby opened. In three chapters bookended with an introduction and conclusion, I focus on the works of Aḥmad Fāris al-Shidyāq (1804-1886), Namık Kemal (1840-1888), Beşir Fuad (1852-1887), and Ibrāhīm al-Muwayliḥī (1844-1906) to articulate—through the coupling of the two bodies of the sovereign and the author—a critique of literary modernity in its relation to shifting discourses of political and literary authority.

The dissertation investigates the medieval poetics of the amatory prelude beginning with the thirteenth century Qaṣīdat al-Burdah – or The Mantle Ode – by the poet Muhammad ibn Sa'īd al-Būṣīrī (d. 1294). Poets expanded the trope of the abandoned ruins to include urban space; incorporated sacred beloveds as poetic beloveds; and foregrounded the self-conscious authorial voice within the prelude. The first chapter locates the thirteenth century Qaṣīdat al-Burdah within the larger Arabic poetic legacy that extends to the ancient pre-Islamic period. The second chapter considers the discursive formation of sacred poetic beloveds, such as the Prophet Muhammad, incorporated among the repertoire of the amatory prelude’s classical and ancient poetic beloveds. The third chapter analyzes the authorial voice and role of the lyric “I” in the preludes of Shaʻbān al-Āthārī (d. 1425) and ʻĀʼishah al-Bāʻūniyyah (d. 1517) who pay homage to their literary predecessors including Ibn al-Fāriḍ (d. 1235), al-Būṣīrī, and Ṣafī al-Dīn al-Ḥillī (d. 1349) by mirroring their metrical composition. The fourth chapter interrogates the intersection of poetics and literary criticism in the medieval Arabic-Islamic devotional invocation that is the hallmark of medieval prolegomena. The preludes within the genre of instructive poems on rhetoric known as the badīʿiyyāt encapsulated literary criticism’s definition of “ingenious beginnings.” Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn al-Ṣafadī (d. 1362) demonstrates this intersection in his prose introduction to al-Ghayth al-Musajjam fī Sharḥ Lāmiyat al-ʿAjam. I conclude by returning to modern iterations of al-Būṣīrī’s Qaṣīdat al-Burdah in literary texts in order to further challenge and raise questions about the discontinuity of medieval Arabic poetics in modern culture.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Center for Religious Studies and Dept. of History. University of Missouri--Kansas City, 2005. / "A dissertation in religious studies and history." Typescript. Advisor: Gary L. Ebersole. Vita. Title from "catalog record" of the print edition Description based on contents viewed March 13, 2007. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 340-360). Online version of the print edition.

This dissertation explores the emergence of a golden age of Arabic encyclopaedic literature in the scholarly centers of Egypt and Syria during the Mamluk Empire (1250-1517). At the heart of the project is a study of Shihāb al-Dīn Aḥmad b. ʿAbd al-Wahhāb al-Nuwayrī’s (d. 1333) Nihāyat al-arab fī funūn al-adab (‘The Ultimate Ambition in the Branches of Erudition’), a 31-volume encyclopaedic work composed at the beginning of the 14th century and divided into five parts: (i) heaven and earth; (ii) the human being; (iii) animals; (iv) plants; and (v) the history of the world. My study examines the formal arrangement, thematic contents, and codicological features of this seminal work, arguing that the rise of encyclopaedism in this period was emblematic of a certain intellectual ethos, a systematic approach to the classification of knowledge which emerged in the discursive context of a rapidly centralizing imperial state. I argue that the Nihāya grew out of an amalgam of several genres (including the adab anthology, the cosmographical compendium, the chancery scribe manual, the dynastic chronicle, and the commonplace book), developing into a new form and serving a different purpose from its literary predecessors. Such texts, long considered tokens of intellectual and cultural decadence, demonstrate the strategies used by Mamluk religious scholars, chancery scribes, and littérateurs to navigate an ever-growing corpus of accumulated knowledge / Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations