l i t e r at u r e
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religion
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middle eastern studies
The Literary Qurʾan Narrative Ethics in the Maghreb H O DA EL SHAKRY
240 pages, 1 b/w illustration 9780823286355 • Paperback • $28.00 (SDT), £21.99 9780823286362 • Hardback • $95.00 (SDT), £79.00 Simultaneous electronic edition available DECE MBE R
The novel, the literary adage has it, reflects a world abandoned by God. Yet the possibilities of novelistic form and literary exegesis exceed the secularizing tendencies of contemporary literary criticism. Showing how the Qurʾan itself invites and enacts critical reading, Hoda El Shakry’s Qurʾanic model of narratology enriches our understanding of literary sensibilities and practices in the Maghreb. The Literary Qurʾan mobilizes the Qurʾan’s formal, narrative, and rhetorical qualities, alongside embodied and hermeneutical forms of Qurʾanic pedagogy, to theorize modern Maghrebi literature. Challenging the canonization of secular modes of reading that occlude religious epistemes, practices, and intertexts, it attends to literature as a site where the process of entextualization obscures ethical imperatives. El Shakry demonstrates how the critical pursuit of knowledge is inseparable from the spiritual cultivation of the self. Placing twentieth-century novels by canonical Francophone writers into conversation with lesser-known Arabophone ones, The Literary Qurʾan stages a series of pairings that invite paratactic readings across texts, languages, and literary canons. HODA EL SHAKRY
l i t e r at u r e
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is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago.
middle eastern studies
Decadent Orientalisms
The Decay of Colonial Modernity DAVI D FIENI
224 pages 9780823286393 • Paperback • $32.00 (SDT), £24.99 9780823286409 • Hardback • $110.00 (SDT), £91.00 Simultaneous electronic edition available JANUARY
Decadent Orientalisms presents a sustained critique of the ways Orientalism and decadence have formed a joint discursive mode of the imperial imagination. Attentive to historical and literary configurations of language, race, religion, and power, Fieni shows the importance of understanding Western discourses of Eastern decline and obsolescence together with Arab and Islamic responses in which the language of decadence returns as a characteristic of the West. Taking seriously Edward Said’s claim that Orientalism is a “style of having power,” Fieni works historically through the aesthetic and ideological effects of Orientalist style, showing how it is at once comparative, descriptive, and performative. Orientalism, the book argues, relies upon decadence as the figure through which its positivist scientific claims become redistributed as speech acts—“truths” that establish dominance. Rather than attend to Orientalism as a repertoire of clichés and stereotypes, Decadent Orientalisms considers the systemic epistemological consequences of the diffuse yet coherent network of institutions that have constituted Orientalism’s power. DAV I D FIENI
is Assistant Professor of French at the State University of New York, Oneonta.
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