Realms of Strangers: Readers, Language, and Trickery in Maqāmāt al-Ḥarīrī
By (author) Asmaa Essakouti
Hardback (Published)
(January 2025)
ISBN: 9783752007930
6.69 x 9.45 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.
- By (author) Asmaa Essakouti
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