Alif Reviews

Contributors 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

This 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.

This 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.

This 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.

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.

This 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.

The 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.