A01=Michael Allan
Al-Jahiz
Allusion
Arabic
Arabic literature
Area studies
Author_Michael Allan
Autobiography
Category=DSA
Category=DSB
Charles Darwin
Close reading
Colonialism
Columbia University Press
Comparative literature
Cosmopolitanism
Criticism
Edward Said
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Franco Moretti
Genre
Hafez
Hermeneutics
Historiography
Ideology
Judith Butler
Linguistics
Literacy
Literariness
Literary criticism
Literary theory
Literature
Manifesto
Modern Standard Arabic
Modernity
Naguib Mahfouz
Narration
Narrative
New Historicism
Novel
Novelist
Of Education
On Religion
Orientalism
Paragraph
Philology
Philosophy of language
Poetry
Postcolonialism
Preface
Princeton University Press
Print culture
Prose
Publication
Quran
Religion
Republic of Letters
Rhetoric
Saba Mahmood
Secular humanism
Secularism
Sensibility
Taha Hussein
Talal Asad
Textuality
The Other Hand
The Various
The World Republic of Letters
Theory
Transliteration
Understanding
World
World literature
Writer
Writing
Product details
- ISBN 9780691167824
- Weight: 454g
- Dimensions: 152 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 05 Apr 2016
- Publisher: Princeton University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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We have grown accustomed to understanding world literature as a collection of national or linguistic traditions bound together in the universality of storytelling. Michael Allan challenges this way of thinking and argues instead that the disciplinary framework of world literature, far from serving as the neutral meeting ground of national literary traditions, levels differences between scripture, poetry, and prose, and fashions textual forms into a particular pedagogical, aesthetic, and ethical practice. In the Shadow of World Literature examines the shift from Qur'anic schooling to secular education in colonial Egypt and shows how an emergent literary discipline transforms the act of reading itself. The various chapters draw from debates in literary theory and anthropology to consider sites of reception that complicate the secular/religious divide--from the discovery of the Rosetta stone and translations of the Qur'an to debates about Charles Darwin in the modern Arabic novel.
Through subtle analysis of competing interpretative frames, Allan reveals the ethical capacities and sensibilities literary reading requires, the conceptions of textuality and critique it institutionalizes, and the forms of subjectivity it authorizes. A brilliant and original exploration of what it means to be literate in the modern world, this book is a unique meditation on the reading practices that define the contours of world literature.
Michael Allan is assistant professor of comparative literature at the University of Oregon.
