Awards

• Winner of 2016 MLA Prize for a First Book, Modern Language Association 2016

Overview

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 eligious 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.

Full Product Details

Author:   Michael Allan
Publisher:   Princeton University Press
Imprint:   Princeton University Press
Volume:   38
Dimensions:   Width: 15.20cm , Height: 2.00cm , Length: 23.50cm
Weight:   0.454kg
ISBN:  

9780691167824

ISBN 10:   0691167826
Pages:   200
Publication Date:   05 April 2016
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Professional and scholarly ,  Tertiary & Higher Education ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Temporarily unavailable  
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Language:   English

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments vii Notes on Transliteration xiii INTRODUCTION 1 Of Words and Worlds 1 Literary Modernity in Colonial Egypt 5 Reading Beyond Representation 7 The Moral Universe of a Secular World 9 A User's Guide 12 1 WORLD The World of World Literature 17 The Constraints of Democratic Criticism 19 International Standards of Excellence? 25 World Literary Space 29 The Saidian Grounds of Worldliness 32 The Force of a Secular World 37 2 TRANSLATION The Rosetta Stone from Object to Text 39 Making Stones Speak 42 Leveling Languages, or The Conditions of Equivalence 45 Entextualization and the Purely Literary 48 The Contours of a Literary Empire 52 3 EDUCATION The Moral Imperative of Modernization 55 Failure's Success: Securing the Imagined Future 58 From Prejudice to Opinion 61 Governing Hermeneutics, Producing Subjects 63 The Colonial Cultivation of Character 66 Immanently Modern and Uncritically Civilized 70 4 LITERATURE How Adab Became Literary 74 A World in Words: Philology as Pedagogy 77 Literary Institutions and the Instantiation of World Literature 80 Footnoting Literature, or The Literary Footnote 83 Orientalism, or Literature for Its Own Sake 87 Disciplines and Frames of Reading 91 5 CRITIQUE Debating Darwin 94 Soundness and the Poetics of the Appropriate 97 The Force of the Illiterate Reader 102 A Passion to Be Cultured: Constructing Intellect and Ignorance 105 Relating Religion: The Discursive Limits of Character 109 The Borders of a Darwinian World 112 6 INTELLECTUALS The Provincialism of a Literary World 115 The Bonds of World Literature 116 Literary Imaginings of Religious Difference 119 Whispers at the Limits of Literary Experience 123 A World Untouched by Literature 127 Provincial Cosmopolitanism 129 CONCLUSION 131 The Dynamics of a Global Public 134 Literary Myopia 135 How to Love the World Properly 138 Notes 141 Bibliography 163 Index 175

Reviews

Allan's incisive In the Shadow of World Literature: Sites of Reading in Colonial Egypt mobilizes reading as a framework for interrogating the now ubiquitous field of world literature. . . . In the Shadow of World Literature's critical self-positioning of its own sites of reading (US academia, comparative literature, the Egyptian colonial archive), alongside consistent signposting for the book's broader argument, are a refreshing departure from the stylistic tendencies of most first monographs. --Hoda El Shakry, Journal of Arabic Literature

Co-Winner of the 2016 MLA Prize for a First Book, Modern Language Association Allan's incisive In the Shadow of World Literature: Sites of Reading in Colonial Egypt mobilizes reading as a framework for interrogating the now ubiquitous field of world literature. . . . In the Shadow of World Literature's critical self-positioning of its own sites of reading (US academia, comparative literature, the Egyptian colonial archive), alongside consistent signposting for the book's broader argument, are a refreshing departure from the stylistic tendencies of most first monographs. --Hoda El Shakry, Journal of Arabic Literature

Allan's incisive In the Shadow of World Literature: Sites of Reading in Colonial Egypt mobilizes reading as a framework for interrogating the now ubiquitous field of world literature. . . . In the Shadow of World Literature's critical self-positioning of its own sites of reading (US academia, comparative literature, the Egyptian colonial archive), alongside consistent signposting for the book's broader argument, are a refreshing departure from the stylistic tendencies of most first monographs. ---Hoda El Shakry, Journal of Arabic Literature Co-Winner of the 2016 MLA Prize for a First Book, Modern Language Association In the Shadow of World Literature contributes to a growing body of work in comparative literature that takes up Arabic language and literature, and offers a significant new approach to how Arabic traditions of learning, recitation, and instruction mediate the constitution of the literary object. I know of no other book that examines ways of reading in quite this way. --Emily Apter, author of Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability In the Shadow of World Literature is beautifully written, well argued, and accessible to an audience ranging from the educated public to literary experts. Allan carefully weaves his argument, simultaneously practicing and critiquing world literature in the best comparative sense possible. --Tarek El-Ariss, author of Trials of Arab Modernity: Literary Affects and the New Political Allan compellingly rethinks the category of world literature for its role in promoting distinctions between literate and illiterate, rational and irrational, and cosmopolitan and fanatic in colonial Egypt. These distinctions, he argues insightfully, are important to the ways that literary sensibilities affect the reception of religious and scriptural traditions. In the Shadow of World Literature illuminates how literature's mediation of the world experienced by readers prompts different responses that shape new forms of secular criticism in postcolonial societies. --Gauri Viswanathan, Columbia University With impressive learning and critical insight, Allan argues that the arrival of modern Arabic writing into the space of world literature is a sign not so much of its progress as of the emergence of a new discipline that shapes particular reading practices as proper and dismisses others as ignorant. This is a truly remarkable work about the transformation of sensibilities that underlie the modern concept of progressive politics. --Talal Asad, author of Formations of the Secular

Author Information

Michael Allan is assistant professor of comparative literature at the University of Oregon.

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