A forum for the critical engagement with the category of World Literature, its significance, including a discussion of systematic theories of its development as well as its tensions with postcolonial literature and the various registers of silence that are its condition of possibility.
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Hania A.M. Nashef deposited J.M. Coetzee’s ‘Jesus’ Trilogy: A Search for Answers in the group
Critical Studies in World Literature on MLA Commons 5 months ago
The 2019 novel by the South African-Australian Nobel laureate, J M Coetzee, The Death of Jesus, is a third book in a sequence that includes Jesus in its title; like its predecessors it follows the lives of a recently constructed family in the dystopian Spanish-speaking towns of Novilla and Estrella. The surreal trilogy, which began with The…[Read more]
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Hania A.M. Nashef deposited Journeys across fragmented lands: Coetzee’s Life and Times of Michael K and Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail in the group
Critical Studies in World Literature on MLA Commons 5 months, 2 weeks ago
Solidarity between South Africa and Palestine has a long history, and often times, a comparison is drawn between the apartheid system in South Africa and the Israeli occupation and settler-colonial project in Palestine. In 1997, the late South African President, Nelson Mandela, said, “We know all too well that our freedom is incomplete without t…[Read more]
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Hania A.M. Nashef deposited Against a reading of a sacred landscape: Raja Shehadeh rewrites the Palestinian presence in Palestinian Walks in the group
Critical Studies in World Literature on MLA Commons 2 years, 10 months ago
ABSTRACT
In his introduction to Palestinian Walks, Raja Shehadeh remarks that in spite of the great number of travelers to Palestine, travel literature, for the most part, willfully ignored the living experience and existence of the land’s inhabitants. Often, Palestine was the imaginary place that was continuously invented to confirm r…[Read more]
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Hania A.M. Nashef deposited Waiting for the arrivant: Godot in two poems by Nizār Qabbānī in the group
Critical Studies in World Literature on MLA Commons 3 years, 1 month ago
The theme of waiting permeates two poems by the late Syrian poet Nizār Qabbānī. The verse in both poems ‘Waiting for Godot’, and ‘A television interview with an Arab Godot’, describes an arduous wait, at once distressing and unpredictable. In the first poem, the poet urges Godot to arrive, as the savior who will appear in the form of the Messia…[Read more]
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Hania A.M. Nashef deposited “‘Nothing is Left to Tell’ Beckettian Despair and Hope in the Arab World” in the group
Critical Studies in World Literature on MLA Commons 3 years, 10 months ago
In the Arab world, Beckett’s plays or their adaptations have not only been popular with audiences and directors but have also inspired other literary and media genres. The Beckettian wait itself has become synonymous with the condition of the Arab person. It is a wait that offers an unrealized potential of hope that reverberates with the d…[Read more]
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Phillip Lundberg started the topic Kafka Group – 5 years of going nowhere….. what does it say. in the discussion
Critical Studies in World Literature on MLA Commons 4 years, 9 months ago
Well, I guess it doesn’t say a whole hell of alot —- as they say….
Most academicians seem to be aware that this MLA group thing is more smoke
and mirrors than reality; so it goes.
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Massih Zekavat deposited The Contingent Dynamics of Political Humor in the group
Critical Studies in World Literature on MLA Commons 5 years ago
CFP for a special issue of the European Journal of Humour Research
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Jay Rajiva deposited ‘The instant of waking from the nightmare’: Emergence Theory and Postcolonial Experience in Season of Migration to the North in the group
Critical Studies in World Literature on MLA Commons 5 years, 1 month ago
This article positions agency as a necessarily lacunal aspect of Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North. By allowing the theatricality of doubling and metaphor to overdetermine Mustafa’s narrative, the novel implicitly challenges both the substitution of symbol for material experience and the rational logic of causation. The disruptive pot…[Read more]
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Hania A.M. Nashef deposited Resisting the cul-de-sac in Disgrace, Master of Petersburg and Life & Times of Michael K in the group
Critical Studies in World Literature on MLA Commons 5 years, 1 month ago
Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot ends in both acts with the two tramps not moving in spite of agreeing that they should leave. Even though Vladimir and Estragon realize the futility of their wait, they remain adamant in the hope that Godot may arrive. Likewise, the Unnamable who cannot go on chooses to go on. What essentially translates in b…[Read more]
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Phillip Lundberg posted an update in the group
Critical Studies in World Literature on MLA Commons 5 years, 7 months ago
“various registers of Silence”–hmm, The Silence of the Sirens or Josephine’s? – Kafka speaks loudest to those who listen in-between the Lines…. Happy to join your group.
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Hania A.M. Nashef deposited A dialogue beyond the nation-state: Darwish’s Mural and Shehadeh’s A Rift in Time: Travels with my Ottoman Uncle in the group
Critical Studies in World Literature on MLA Commons 5 years, 7 months ago
Even though postcolonial theory has helped in the critique of non-western texts, it has for the most part failed to engage with the Arab region and its literatures in spite of Edward Said’s seminal book, Orientalism. Robert Young argues that postcolonial theory since its inception has been concerned with the politics of invisibility, striving to m…[Read more]
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Hania A.M. Nashef deposited HOMO SACER DWELLS IN SARAMAGO’S LAND OF EXCEPTION in the group
Critical Studies in World Literature on MLA Commons 5 years, 9 months ago
Giorgio Agamben defines the sacred man or Homo Sacer as one who is not worthy of sacrifice. Having lost all rights, the person is reduced to the non-human. In modern times, banishment or banning by the law occurs when a state of exception is sanctioned by a totalitarian supremacy that suspends judicial power. The state of exception does not lie…[Read more]
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Hania A.M. Nashef deposited Ideal Cities-Marred Individuals: J. M. Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus and José Saramago’s A Caverna in the group
Critical Studies in World Literature on MLA Commons 6 years, 3 months ago
In the final pages of J. M. Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus and José Saramago’s A Caverna, the main protagonists flee to an unknown destination from their respective “utopias.” Both allegorical novels expose the ills of two guarded and structured communities. A Caverna, a parable of Plato’s cave, depicts the story of the lives of 64-year-old…[Read more]
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Ewa Lukaszyk deposited Written Exercises: Ancestral Magic and Emergent Intellectuals in Mia Couto, Lhoussain Azergui and Dorota Masłowska in the group
Critical Studies in World Literature on MLA Commons 6 years, 8 months ago
The article consists in a comparative reading of three novels: Um rio chamado tempo by Mia Couto, Le pain des corbeaux by Lhoussain Azergui and Paw królowej by Dorota Masłowska. In spite of the difference of the historical circumstances of Mozambique, Morocco and Poland, these three books meet at an intersecting point: the emergence of an i…[Read more]
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Patricia I. Vieira started the topic CFP: The Language of Plants: Science, Philosophy, Literature and Cinema in the forum
Critical Studies in World Literature on MLA Commons 9 years, 8 months ago
Call for Papers: Edited Collection
The Language of Plants: Science, Philosophy, Literature and Cinema
(forthcoming, 2015)Edited by Patricia Vieira, Monica Gagliano and John Ryan
Ecocriticism’s rise to prominence in the fields of literature and cultural studies has been paralleled by the investigations of plant intelligence in botany and by n…[Read more]
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Andrew N. Rubin created the group
Critical Studies in World Literature on MLA Commons 10 years ago