<p dir="ltr">Violent death that violates the ontological dignity of the body and the disappeared corpse often results in a crisis of mourning for those left behind, with the matter made all the more complicated when it comes to instances of politically motivated violence in the context of war. What follows such death/disappearance are issues of identification, collection of remains and, ultimately, an inability to enact necessary death rituals such as washing, shrouding and burial, leading to a separation between the dislocated soul and the corporeal form on part of the dead and the issue of incomplete mourning on part of the bereaved. Both the living and the dead, thus, come to occupy a liminal space (<i>barzakh</i>) where the boundaries between past/present, human/non-human, and dead/alive fall away. This paper argues that this in-between state helps the mourner gain access to a radical state of bearing witness outside of the oppressive binaries of the modern world. This work makes use of Middle Eastern (Iraq, Palestine, Egypt) and South Asian (Kashmir) literatures dealing with dehumanization and violent death in the context of what Achille Mbembe refers to as “death-worlds,” inhabitants of which are deemed “living-dead.”</p>

This thesis focuses on the production, circulation, and reception of contemporary Middle Eastern literatures in Britain and the United States. I'm particularly interested in the novel form, and in assessing how both translated Middle Eastern novels and anglophone novels by migrant writers engage with dominant Anglo-American discourses of politics, gender, and religion in the region. In negotiation with Edward Said's Orientalism, I develop a materialist postcolonial critical model to analyse how such discourses undergird publishing and marketing strategies towards novels by Ibrahim Nasrallah, Hisham Matar, Yasmin Crowther, Orhan Pamuk, and others. I argue that as Middle Eastern novels travel, whether via translation or authorial acts of migration, across cultures and languages, they are reshaped according to dominant audience expectations. But, I continue, they also retain traces of their source cultures which must be brought to the surface in critical readings. Drawing on the work of David Damrosch, Pascale Casanova, Franco Moretti, and Aamir Mufti, I thus develop a reading practice, what I call 'post-Orientalist comparatism', that allows me to read past the domesticating strategies framing these novels and to newly reveal their more local, thus potentially transgressive, takes on Middle Eastern socio-political issues. I cumulatively suggest that Middle Eastern novels in English formally embody a dialectic of 'East' and 'West', of the local and the global, thus have important implications for our understanding of the English and world novel traditions. I conceive of my thesis as a dual intervention into the fields of postcolonial studies and world literature. I am primarily concerned to reorient postcolonial theory around questions of Middle Eastern literary and cultural production, areas that have been traditionally neglected due to an entrenched, but unsustainable, anglophone bias. To do so, I turn to the work of Edward Said, and rethink the foundational problematic of Orientalism with an eye towards political, material, and cultural developments since 1978, the year in which Orientalism was first published, and towards the unique transnational positionality of the genre of the Middle Eastern novel in English. I also turn to theorists of world literature such as David Damrosch in order to develop a reading practice thoroughly attentive to issues of circulation, but, along the lines set out by Aamir Mufti, seek to interrogate their work for its occlusions of the impact of orientalist discourse in the historical development of the category of 'World Literature'. My thesis thus not only draws on postcolonial and world literary theory to analyse its object, the Middle Eastern novel in English, but also demonstrates how proper attention to this object necessitates a theoretical recalibration of these fields.

Scholars have well established the influence of the Old and Middle English, Norse, Welsh, and also Medieval Latin and Christian mythologies that influenced the writings of J.R.R. Tolkien. In particular, the mythology contained in The Silmarillion, specific the cosmology, behaves as sacred texts do in the primary world and mirrors a number of extant mythologies when they are directly compared. Several scholars have note, but as yet no one has studied in depth, the relationship between the cosmology the The Silmarillion to that of a number of extant ancient Near Eastern mythologies. This thesis seeks to address that gap in the scholarship by specifically exploring Tolkien's mythological creation story in relation to those of the Mesopotamian, Egyptian, and Abrahamic of the Near East. Such a comparative study reveals a number of structural and thematic parallels that attest to the complexity of Tolkien's work that and can be used to argue that his mythology can be considered as well-developed and surprisingly authentic as any of these ancient mythological traditions. / by Amanda M. Dutton. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2012. / Includes bibliography. / Mode of access: World Wide Web. / System requirements: Adobe Reader.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1992. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 301-307).

<p>This dissertation examines the negotiations between narrative, identity, and place in the fictional works of three major contemporary Muslim women descendants of Arab immigrants: Leila Houari, Faiza Guène, and Mohja Kahf. The study focuses on four novels: <i>Zeida de nulle part, Kiffe kiffe demain</i>, <i>Du rêve pour les oufs</i>, and <i>The Girl with The Tangerine Scarf</i>. </p><p><br></p> <p>Two key questions structure my examination of the four novels: 1) How do Muslim women living in a non-Muslim society construct and negotiate their individual and collective identities?; 2) To what extent does their experience of space (domestic, public, national) shape their perceptions of self? These questions form a foundation for better understanding the experience of Muslim women living in predominantly non-Muslim societies. I must emphasize, however, that this is in no way a representation of all Muslim women living in majoritarian non-Muslim societies and in no way can summarize each and every experience. If anything, the dissertation provides an account of diverse sets of experiences of what some may encounter, rather than a collective static representation. </p><p><br></p> <p>By doing so, this study aims to decrease the dissonance between the different viewpoints of the women characters in these novels by highlighting their experiences and subjecting certain misconceptions to critical scrutiny. The dissertation relies on an interdisciplinary approach, as it integrates different theories and concepts ranging from cognitive science, postcolonial studies, literary studies, psychology, and religious studies.</p> <br> <p> </p>

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<p>This thesis argues that <i>Morituri</i> by Yasmina Khadra and <i>White Masks</i> by Elias Khoury use the genre of the detective novel as a pretext for social and political critique of Algeria and Lebanon respectively. This thesis links the generic (crime fiction) and the conceptual (Political and Social Critique in Modern Arab World). While the detective novel is traditionally thought of as a non-academic, entertaining part of popular culture, the use of the genre to critique the failure of nation building after colonization elevates the genre and transforms it from mere entertainment to a more serious genre. Both novels are emblematic of a shift in the use of the detective and crime novel to address the political disarray in their respective states and the Arab world as a whole. As modern examples of detective novels in the modern Arab world, <i>Morituri</i> and <i>White Masks</i> transform the genre through their complex interweaving of aspects of the popular genre of detective fiction with the more serious political novel. The historical and political context of both countries at the time of the novels’ settings are an intrinsic part of understanding the crimes and the obfuscation of the perpetrator. In both of these novels, the technical and generic aspects are connected to the thematic, and the detective novel structure is not just there for suspense and entertainment. Instead, this structure points to the neocolonial system, benefitting the most powerful and the most affluent at the expense of the weak, poor, and disadvantaged.</p>