This issue of Alif is devoted to travel and travel-writing in the broadest cross-cultural sense and focuses on what Mahmoud Manzalauoui has termed indigenes, visitants, sojourners, and habitants or metics, particularly in Egypt and the Middle East. It is a tribute to Middle East scholar and acclaimed travel writer John Rodenbeck. Essays in this issue take a variety of approaches, ranging from the historical to the analytical and philosophical. Contributors include Sahar Sobhi Abdel-Hakim, Fadwa Adbel Rahman, Michael Haag, JDF Jones, Ceza Kassem, Nabil Matar, Malise Ruthven, Sarah Searight, and Terry Walz.
Alif 26
Wanderlust: Travel Literature of Egypt and the Middle East
Edited by
Ferial Ghazoul
1 September 2006
528 pp.
17X24cm
ISBN 9789774160110
For sale worldwide
$24.95
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Alif 19
Gender and Knowledge: Contributions of Gender Perspectives to Intellectual Formations
Edited by Ferial GhazoulContributors are from Egypt, Palestine, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, USA, India, Britain, and France. English Section: Saad Al Bazei, Doris Shoukri, Aisha Abdel Rahman (Bint al-Shati’), Melissa Matthes, Huda Lutfi, Srilata Ravi, Brinda Mehta, Maijan Al-Ruwaili, David Blanks, Jehan Al-Bayoumi, Nasr Abu Zeid Arabic Section: Hoda Elsadda, Sherine Abu el Naga, Sherif Hetata, Buthaina Al Nasiri, Salma Jayyusi, Nasr Abu Zeid, Muhammad Mahmoud, Virginia Woolf, Olfat Al Roubi, Heba Ra’ouf Ezzat, Muhammad Brairi, Julia Kristeva
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Alif 20
The Hybrid Literary Text: Arab Creative Authors Writing in Foreign Languages
Edited by Ferial GhazoulThis issue of Alif is devoted to exploring creative texts by authors from the Arab world (including Karim Alrawi, Edward Said, Rafik Schami, and Ahdaf Soueif) who write in foreign languages: Dutch, English, French, German, and Hebrew. Contributors: English Section: Shereen Abou El Naga, Magda Amin, Soraya Antonius, Anne Armitage, Andrea Flores, Nadia Gindi, Richard Jacquemond, Mahmoud El Lozy, Amin Malak, Khaled Mattawa, Cynthia Nelson, Marlous Willemsen. Arabic Section: Etel Adnan, Mahamed Lamine Ould Moulay Brahim, Ferial J. Ghazoul, Edwar al-Kharrat, Walid El Khachab, Abdelwahab Meddeb, Samia Mehrez, Dalia Said Mostafa, Tahia Abdel Nasser, Mahmoud Qassim, Bashir El-Siba’i, Anton Shammas, Muhammad Siddiq, Ahdaf Soueif.
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538 pp.17X24cm
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Alif 24
Archaeology of Literature: Tracing the Old in the New
Edited by Ferial GhazoulThis issue of Alif investigates the different strata constituting texts, and the presence of older material (myths, classics, hymns, rituals, romance, philosophical fragments, etc.) as subtexts in literature. Articles explore the processes and modalities of such inclusions in a given work or the corpus of an author. The issue also includes critical essays on the nature of continuity and correspondence in plots, characters, and styles as well as redeployment of older motifs in modern and postmodern works. Contributors: English section: Walid Bitar, Leslie Croxford, Ananya Kabir, Rondo Keele, Steven Nimis, John Rodenbeck, Edward Said, Doris Shoukri, Mounira Soliman, Steffen Stelzer. Arabic section: Mohammed ‘Ajina, Mohammed Birairi, Ayman Al-Desouky, Hasab al-Sheikh Ja‘far, Scheherazade Hassan, Sami Mahdi, Samia Mehrez, Mai Muzaffar/Rafa Nasiri, Lamis Al-Nakkash/Doris Shoukri, Nagwa Sha‘ban.
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1 December 2004
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500 pp.17X24cm
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Alif 27
Childhood: Creativity and Representation
Edited by Ferial GhazoulThis issue of Alif is published on the centennial anniversary of the founding the first Casa dei Bambini, a progressive educational institution for children, which seeks an alternative mode in bringing them up and nurturing their independence. An extract from the writings of the pedagogue of this innovative method, Maria Montessori, is here translated into Arabic for the first time. This collection covers the universe of children through interviews, photo-essays, testimonies, and articles in psychology, philosophy, law, music, fiction, media, poetry, and drama, addressing varied aspects of childhood: from Shakespeare for children to puppet theater in Egypt; from plays for dispossessed camp children to children enlisted in militias; from the affluent and leisurely childhood of Virginia Woolf to the wonders of the early years of a poet like Muhammad Afifi Matar. Essays also explore heroism and ethical values in children’s literature, as well as musical adaptations of children’s literature and the art and craft of making books for children. Alif Volume 27 Contributors: Abdelfattah Abusrour, Saeed Alwakeel, Nasseif Azmy, Mia Carter, Sharif S. Elmusa, Adib Fattal, Stephannie S. Gearhart, Ferial J. Ghazoul, Amanie Fawzi Habashi, Gala El Hadidi, Thomas Hartwell, Sayyid Hegab, Nadia El Kholy, Mohieddin al-Labbad, Muhammad Afifi Matar, Tanya M. Monforte, Maria Montessori, Yasmine Motawy, Naomi Shihab Nye, Michal Oklot, Mounira Soliman, Wiam El-Tamami, Matthew Whoolery.
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1 March 2008
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404 pp.17X24cm
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Alif 28
Artistic Adaptations: Approaches and Positions
Edited by Ferial GhazoulThis issue of Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics addresses literary and artistic adaptations comprehensively. It offers articles on adaptations and appropriations of textual and visual material, focusing on adapting works from one genre to another, from one discourse to another, and from one medium to another. Transformation, modification, and ‘writing back’ in the process of adaptation are analyzed and contextualized. The volume covers adaptation of, among other things, novels into films, sacred texts into literary works, rituals into installation art, historical documents into narrative texts, art objects into poetic discourse, folk legends into dramatic works, ideological positions into fables, erotic verses into Sufi lessons, and e-mails and personal diaries into performances. The contributors are from Africa, America, Asia, and Europe. Between them they cover postcolonial adaptations, gendered appropriations, and literary rewriting of the past, as well as theoretical and esthetic dimensions of such artistic adaptations. Examples are given from Egyptian, Iraqi, Kuwaiti, Pakistani, American, British, Andalusian, and sub-Saharan African works. There are also translations related to the topic of adaptation, and testimonies by writers who have adapted works across genres. Alif 28.
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15 September 2008
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500 pp.17X24cm
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Alif 30
Trauma and Memory
Edited by Ferial GhazoulThis issue of Alif focuses on trauma and loss and their presence in collective and individual memory. The question of traumatic events has been recognized in psychology, psychoanalysis, and literature, but scholarly studies have mostly concentrated on traumas enacted in the West—World Wars and the Holocaust. Contributors to this volume attempt to extend the field of trauma and memory studies to include other parts of the world: Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Iran, India, Ireland, Lebanon, Palestine, Pakistan, multi-ethnic America, and ancient Greece. The Lebanese civil war or the Peloponnesian war, the Nakba of 1948 or the Naksa of 1967: the articles and personal testimonies in this issue explore the impact of such tragic events on literary genre, films, fiction, folk culture, poetry, drama, and visual arts. Alif: Journal of Comperative Poetics 30 Contributors: Nasr Hamid Abu-Zayd, Galal Amin, Gaber Asfour, Mohammed Berrada, Céza Kassem-Draz, Sabry Hafez, Barbara Harlow, Malak Hashem, Wolfhart Heinrichs, Richard Jacquemond, Andrew Rubin, Doris Enright-Clark Shoukri, and Hoda Wasfi.
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1 September 2010
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536 pp.17X24cm
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Nocturnal Poetics
The Arabian Nights in Comparative Context
Ferial J. GhazoulThe Book of a Thousand and One Nights, better known as The Arabian Nights, is a classic of world literature and the most universally known work of Arabic narrative. Although much has been written about it, Professor Ghazoul’s analysis is the first to apply modern critical methodology to the study of this intricate and much-admired literary masterpiece. The author draws on a wealth of critical tools — medieval Arabic aesthetics and poetics, mythology and folklore, allegory and comedy, postmodern literary criticism, and formal and structural analysis — to explain the specific genius of the The Arabian Nights. The author describes and examines the internal cohesion of the book, establishing its morphology and revealing the dialectics of the frame-story and enframed cycles of narrative. She discusses various forms of narrative — folk epics, animal fables, Sindbad voyages, and demon stories — and analyzes them in relation to narrative works from India, Europe, and the Americas. Covering an impressive range of writings, from ancient Indian classics to the works of Shakespeare and the modern writers Jorge Luis Borges and John Barth, she places The Arabian Nights in the context of an ongoing storytelling tradition and reveals its influence on world literature.
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1 November 1996
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Alif 32
The Imaginary and the Documentary: Cultural Studies in Literature, History, and the Arts
Edited by Ferial GhazoulThis issue of Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics is devoted to the intersection of the imaginary and the documentary, the fictional and the cultural in the three genres of literature (poetry, fiction, and drama), in history, in film (feature and documentary), in photography, in plastic arts, and in architecture. Collage in art, portrait paintings, political poetry, archival footage in films, the historical novel, and the metaphors of historiography are some of the examples that demonstrate the interfacing between the imaginary and the documentary. Subjectivity and ideology of the artist and scholar might be couched in a flight of fantasy or in a rational argument, but in both cases they are joined to a specific worldview that is analyzed and discussed. Contributors: Abdel Rahman El Abnoudy, Emad Abdel Latif, Saeed Alwakil, Tamim El Barghouti, Judith Butler, Safaa Fathy, Tahany El Gebaly, Ahmed Haddad, Sabry Hafez, Chouaib Halifi, Stuart Hall, Barbara Harlow, Ahmed Heakl, Jeffrey Herlihy, Ahmed Abdel Mo‘ty Higazi, Abdullah Ibrahim, Walid El Khachab, Jalal Uddin Khan, Hasna Lebbady, Iman Mersal, Helmi Salem, Stephanie Schwerter, Basheer El Sibaei, Larbi Touaf, John Carlos Rowe, Angela Vaupel, Elizabeth Wickett, Shaaban Yusuf.
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Alif 24
Archaeology of Literature: Tracing the Old in the New
Edited by Ferial GhazoulThis issue of Alif investigates the different strata constituting texts, and the presence of older material (myths, classics, hymns, rituals, romance, philosophical fragments, etc.) as subtexts in literature. Articles explore the processes and modalities of such inclusions in a given work or the corpus of an author. The issue also includes critical essays on the nature of continuity and correspondence in plots, characters, and styles as well as redeployment of older motifs in modern and postmodern works. Contributors: English section: Walid Bitar, Leslie Croxford, Ananya Kabir, Rondo Keele, Steven Nimis, John Rodenbeck, Edward Said, Doris Shoukri, Mounira Soliman, Steffen Stelzer. Arabic section: Mohammed ‘Ajina, Mohammed Birairi, Ayman Al-Desouky, Hasab al-Sheikh Ja‘far, Scheherazade Hassan, Sami Mahdi, Samia Mehrez, Mai Muzaffar/Rafa Nasiri, Lamis Al-Nakkash/Doris Shoukri, Nagwa Sha‘ban.
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Arab Women’s Lives Retold
Exploring Identity through Writing
Edited by Nawar Al-Hassan GolleyWith a foreword byMiriam Cooke
Examining late twentieth-century autobiographical writing by Arab women novelists, poets, and artists, this anthology explores the ways in which Arab women have portrayed and created their identities within differing social environments. Even as the collection dismantles standard notions of Arab female subservience, the works presented here go well beyond the confines of those traditional boundaries. The book explores the many routes Arab women writers have taken to speak to each other, to their readers, and to the world at large. Drawing from a rich body of literature, the essays collectively attest to the surprisingly lively and committed roles Arab women play in varied geographic regions, at home and abroad. These recent writings assess how the interplay between individual, private, ethnic identity and the collective, public, global world of politics has impacted Arab women’s rights.
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Alif 21
The Lyrical Phenomenon
Edited by Ferial GhazoulThis issue of Alif explores the lyrical drive in its myriad manifestations: its formal presence in poems, epics and songs; and its informal dissemination in narratives, philosophy, painting, calligraphy, music and even in broken and discarded objects. The issue covers many languages and touches on a variety of cultures: Mesopotamian, Nile Valley, Greco-Roman; South African and North African; English and Irish; Greek and French; American and Arabic; Persian and Turkish; Urdu and German. Beside academic articles, this issue includes creative essays, poetry and art—all combine to analyze or embody the lyrical impulse.
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