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 thesis inquires into anti-humanist trends in Lebanese literature of the civil war and post-war period by examining the limit concept of the animal in three novelistic works: Beirut Nightmares [Kawābīs Bayrūt] (1976) by Ghādah Sammān, Yalo (2002) by Elias Khoury, and The Tiller of Waters [Ḥārith al-miyāh] (1998) by Hudá Barakāt. Marking a departure in previous critical work done on this body of literature, which has been dominated by trauma theory as an analytical framework, this thesis employs an innovative synthesis of narrative theory and affect theory to describe how the authors utilize narrative to humanize the war experience, thereby mitigating the effects of contingency and fragmentation on the narrative subject. After the collapse of the state, the human being is separated from its political form, leaving it perilously exposed to acts of violence. It may also, however, carry out aggressions on its fellow man with impunity. Both of these terrible aspects of man’s nature in wartime are understood conventionally as exposing a beast within man, since they radically undermine the precepts of moral value and self-sovereignty that constitute the pillars of humanism. Through acts of “composition” the first person narrators of these novels strive to insulate their affective core from participating in ambient currents of violence, which are viewed as a kind of contamination understood as “becoming-animal.” While implicating the subject in a participation that is other-than-human, these animal becomings are also, following Deleuze and Guttari, ways of attaining a new vitality and escaping the hierarchical symbolic power of logos. Use of this animal figure allows the authors to rethink the human in ways that does not assume a fixed humanist ontology. For Sammān, the animal represents a principle of vitality that allows her protagonist to overcome human sources of inertia, such as melancholic memories or ingrained habit, thereby preserving the authentic voice of the writerly self. For Khoury and Barakāt, the animal permits them to foreground the figure of the subaltern who stands in a minoritarian relation to logos. They also propose a post-humanist ethos of co-presence based on the affective subject’s receptivity and vulnerability; its capacity to both affect and be affected. / text

This thesis examines the theme of desert as literary environment in modern Arabic short story. The aim of this thesis is to analyze the short story's texts dealing with the desert. This topic will be approached in terms of semantic-symbolic analysis, which will be matched by the relationship between nature and the environment as a landscape, and nature as a source of mythological and fantastic ideas, which are reflected in the life of literary figures and story construction. The work includes a search for an answer to the question of what is the diference between the author who has direct access to the desert and the other one who deals with urban or other environments according to the geographic origin. The work is divided into three parts, which then develop symbolic, mythological and anthropological analysis of selected texts. Key words: desert, Ibrahim al-Koni, symbols, mysticism, modern Arabic literature

My dissertation examines the Russian influence on the critical writing, poetry, prose and philosophy of Mikhail Naimy (1889-1988), the world renowned figure in modern Arabic literature. Together with Jibran Khalil Jibran, Ameen al-Rihani, Ilia Abu Madi, Rachid Ayuub, and several other Arab-American men of letters he founded the Pen Association, a literary league in New York in 1920 that lifted Arabic literature from the quagmire of stagnation, imitation and old classicism. They also promoted the new generation of Arab writers and made it an active force in Arab nationalism. Numerous researchers have studied the impact of British, American and French cultures and literatures on the Pen Association's creative writings. Meanwhile it was Russian literature that had the most important impact on Naimy, as well as on some other members of this literary association (though less). This influence has still only been studied superficially aside from some Soviet era analyses. My dissertation makes a much-needed contribution to this blank spot, since the Russian literary critic Vissarion Belinskiī (1811-1848) and the towering figure of Leo Tolstoī (1828-1910) contributed greatly to the foundation of the modern Arabic literature. My dissertation traces Mikhail Naimy's Russian Orthodox heritage in Lebanon, his education in Poltava, Ukraine, and his readings of Belinskiī and Tolstoī to show how he incorporates critical social reform, anticlericalism and mysticism into his important Arabic language works. It also shows the influence of the Russian literary criticism on Naimy's critical articles. My dissertation sheds light on global literary processes, as Naimy was able to synthesize Russian, European and American literary traditions into his native Arabic heritage. This integration is an important part of the evolution of modern Arabic literature and an interesting phenomenon that emerged in the American melting pot of the early twentieth century. My research has significant methodological value, as it will identify the typology and significance of cultural contacts, based on the example of influence mentioned above. It will also contribute to an important topic of the renewed interest in the academy - Russian influences and impacts in the Middle East and in Arabic culture and literature.

Bc. Adéla Provazníková Strategies of literary translation during the Nahḍa Abstract: The thesis deals with the topic of literary translation in the Arab world during the Nahḍa. It falls within the framework of descriptive translation studies and is based methodologically on Gideon Toury's model (1995), which determines its structure and goals. Following a brief historical and literary context the thesis systematically describes attitudes towards translation in given period and finds that translational terminology and requirements were changing during the 19th century and only yet stabilizing. The core of this thesis lies in the textual analysis of two novels and three short stories, which reveal individual translational strategies. It shows that Arab translators in the colonial context dealt with the source text in a creative manner and accommodated translated texts to the cultural and historical particularities of a contemporary Arab reader. Keywords: translation strategies, modern Arabic literature, Nahḍa, paraliterature, Adib Ishaq, Labiba Hashim, cultural encounter

Cette étude se propose de répondre à la problématique liée à la généricité d’un corpus de maqāmāt de type munāẓarāt paysagères composées au Yémen à l’époque postclassique. L’appellation maqāma devient, en effet, de plus en plus englobante au point de s’étendre à la munāẓara, ce qui nous permet de parler d’une évolution générique par régime de transformation. L’analyse de ces œuvres permet aussi de montrer comment ces textes revendiquent une appartenance et un rattachement à la notion d’adab, point essentiel pour la compréhension générique de ces œuvres. Cette étude se propose d’analyser également les représentations paysagères qui sont au cœur de ces munāẓarāt. Elle aborde les éléments constitutifs du paysage en tenant compte de l’organisation de ces représentations sur l’axe vertical et l’axe horizontal, mais aussi en fonction de différents sens sollicités : la vue, l’odorat et l’ouïe. Tous ces éléments nous poussent à considérer les représentations paysagères présentes dans les descriptions du Paradis coranique ainsi que dans des descriptions similaires présentes dans la poésie arabe classique. L’étude de ces corpus montre, en dernier lieu, que le but des auteurs n’est pas celui de créer des représentations bucoliques sur la description de la nature mais que derrière la simple description paysagère, ces textes sont la plupart du temps porteurs d’un message situé à un second niveau de lecture (politique, religieux, etc.). / This work aims at studying the question of the literary genre of a corpus of maqāmāt of the kind “landscape munāẓarāt” written in Yemen in the Post-Classical era. The name maqāma has become always more comprehensive until it extended to the munāẓara. Hence, we can speak of a generic evolution due to processing. The analysis of such texts allows us to show why they claim to belong to the notion of adab, which is an essential point for understanding the genre of these works. This study deals also with the landscape representations that are at the heart of these munāẓarāt. It approaches the constituent elements of the landscape according to the organisation of the representation - on the vertical or on the horizontal axis – and also through the different senses appealed to the perception: sight, smell and hearing. All these elements lead us to consider landscape representations in the Koranic description of Paradise and in other similar descriptions in Classical Arabic poems. Finally, the study of this corpus shows that the aim of the authors is not a bucolic representation of nature. Instead, behind the simple landscape description, most of texts convey a message related to politics, religion, etc. located in a second level of reading.

This thesis examines the work of the contemporary exilic Iraqi author Ḥasan Blāsim within the framework of magical realism. At the same time it argues for a more formalistic and wider definition of magical realism, which also includes fiction without any supernatural elements. Magical realistic components found in the short story collection Majnūn sāḥat al-ḥurrīya (The Madman of Freedom Square) underline the most important themes in the stories. These are related to the catastrophes that afflicted Iraq and its people in the course of last thirty years. With its emphasis on the documentation of modern Iraqi history dominated by war and exile Blāsim's work belongs to the genre of documentary narrative. The goal of documentary narrative is to contribute to the collective memory of a nation. Despite Blāsim's focus on documenting, magical realism in his work cannot be considered as an attempt to create a parallel cultural world. The supernatural in his stories functions metaphorically and relates exclusively to the real world of war and violence, in which people under heavy circumstances turn into animals, cannibals, which is magical in itself. In addition, Blāsim's work is on a subordinate level discussed from the perspective of postcolonial theory. Postcolonial theory has undergone a complicated...

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