Alif 31 Reviews

This 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adaptation of, among other things, novels into films, sacred texts into literary works, rituals into installation art, historical documents into narrative texts, art objects into poetic discourse, folk legends into dramatic works, ideological positions into fables, erotic verses into Sufi lessons,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.

Autobiography is a protean genre: it covers so many forms and styles. When narrating one’s life, the narrator has to choose what he or she considers to be relevant and decisive. Beside the differences on what is fundamental in a life, the notion of the Self is culturally defined and thus varies from one place to another. The author of an autobiographical text may express only a fragment of his or her life, follow a thread in the trajectory through reminiscences, memoir, diaries, testimony, interview, letters, poems, etc. The author may declare openly that he or she is identical with the protagonist or may give the principal character a different name or no name. The author may depict private or public events, at times taking imaginative license or even including fantastic motifs. Autobiographical discourse is not only culturally conditioned; it is also symptomatic of the cultural moment. Thus it is important to explore the varieties of self-presentation, and not assume a fixed paradigm.

In this revisionist spirit that looks for different and alternative ways of recording one’s life, Alif presents the autobiographical drive in multiple contexts: ancient and contemporary Egyptian; nineteenth-century and twentieth-century Arab, Moroccan, and Iraqi; South African and West African; Canadian and American; Palestinian and Sudanese; English and Irish; and even that of a hybrid background Chinese American and Algerian French. There has been a tremendous surge in autobiographical writing in recent years, and the field has been redefined by literary and cultural critics.

From James Olney (ed.), Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical (1980) to Dwight Reynolds (ed.), Interpreting the Self: Autobiography in the Arabic Literary Tradition (2001), a range of works have appeared challenging established views and approaches on the subject of autobiography. The epigraphs (whose English translation is drawn from the works mentioned above) attest to the complexity and diversity of motivations in writing about one’s past life.