Realms of Strangers: Readers, Language, and Trickery in Maqāmāt al-Ḥarīrī
By (author) Asmaa Essakouti
Hardback (Published)
(January 2025)
ISBN: 9783752007930
6.69 x 9.49 inches
Price: $104.00
On back order
Literatures in Context is a peer-reviewed book series devoted to Near Eastern and North African literatures. The editors want the title of the series to be understood programmatically. They presuppose a concept of world literature that includes Near Eastern and North African literatures. What is more, they assume that literatures are in many ways marked by intertextuality, that they constitute readings of extremely diverse earlier texts, and that they are posited within a field of tensions, much broader than their respective national language. For the earlier eras of Near Eastern and North African literatures, this field of tensions geographically covers the regions of the Southern and Eastern Mediterranean and Asia Minor. In modern times, it has become a space of interaction that has long since included “global” Western literatures (and realities). This does not imply that the modern Near Eastern and North African literatures have severed themselves from their predecessors. Instead it is precisely the tension between different sets of references in modern Near Eastern and North African literatures, or their “local historical context”, which is a great part of their attraction, that remains a crucial field of research for the modern scholar.
The Maqamat of Hariri features an intellectual pursuing a trickster to collect his rare words, sophisticated compositions, and curious accounts. Writing against the grain of modernist and Orientalist readings, Essakouti argues that strangeness in both language and space is the key to this forgotten classic, which makes it worth reading also today. Only a stranger (gharib) who comes from a distant land can fulfill the audience’s obsessive desire for curiosities, wondrous accounts, and exotic vocabulary (gharib), which always exists elsewhere.
Dr. Asmaa Essakouti was born on 23 June 1993. She studied Arabic and Comparative Literature at the Moulay Ismail and Ibn Zohr Universities in Morocco and at Doha Institute in Qatar. She received her PhD in Arabic Studies at the Free University of Berlin in 2023. Since March 2024, she is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Arabic and Islamic Studies at University of Münster. Her research interests include pre-modern and modern Arabic literature, narratology, fiction, and humour.
- By (author) Asmaa Essakouti
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Prozesse von Aneignung und Abgrenzung in der zeitgenössischen türkischen Literatur
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Gender, sozialer Status, historiographische Re-Präsentation:Zwei Frauenbiographien aus der frühen Abbasidenzeit
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Ein leises Geräusch wie ein Gefühl des Sehnens
Dichtung und Zeugenschaft zum faschistischen Konzentrationslager in Libia Coloniale
Die Entblößung der Wörter
aš-Šidyāqs literarische Listen als Kultur- und Gesellschaftskritik im 19. Jahrhundert
Gestalten durch Verbergen
Ghassan Salhabs melancholischer Blick auf Beirut in Film, Video und Dichtung
Brückenschläge
Eine integrierte »turkoarabische« Romangeschichte (Mitte 19. bis Mitte 20. Jahrhundert)
Erzählte Tradition
Historische und literarische Figuren im Werk von Zakariya Tamir. Eine narratologische Analyse
Reading Across Modern Arabic Literature and Art
Three Case Studies: Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, Abd al-Rahman Munif, Etel Adnan
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Volume 41
