C. Ceyhun Arslan introduces his recently published book “The Ottoman Canon and the Construction of Arabic and Turkish Literatures” which challenges assumptions about the modernization of Arabic and Turkish literatures, examining their evolution into national literatures comparable to Western ones. The book explores how Ottoman authors navigated multilingual influences, shaping literary traditions and national identities in the Middle East and North Africa. It highlights how late Ottoman and post-Ottoman scholars integrated and reinterpreted classical texts, revealing the complex cultural and literary dynamics that formed modern Arabic and Turkish literary canons.
In this article, Cyrine Kortas reviews the Tunisian writer Faten Fazaa’s book “Hysteria”. Written in Tunisian dialect and focusing on the everyday struggles of an ordinary woman from the old Medina, the book is labeled as Tunisian chick lit, a new literary genre that has flourished. Offering a glimpse into the lives of Tunisian young women, she addresses social and political issues while questioning cultural norms. By means of this novel Cyrine Kortas examines the topic of female gender identity negotiation in a Muslim society on the eve of the Arab Spring era.
By Juliane Prade-Weiss. One of the puzzling questions about Russia’s ongoing war in Ukraine and other conflicts is why people participate in, support, or condone mass violence when it appears, for observers, so glaringly wrong. Reasons for becoming complicit with violence against civilians vary with individual positions as well as historical and regional contexts. Participation in, aiding and abetting mass violence and the structures of authoritarian, totalitarian or other regimes exerting it are key issues in the social sciences and in history. Yet, literary texts can contribute to understanding complicity, too.
In this report, Elen Budinova shares some reflections and impressions regarding the conference “Developing Ukrainian Studies: Ukraine in Research and Teaching in the Subjects Slavic Literary and Cultural Studies, Slavic Linguistics in Dialogue with East European History”, which took place in the Dornburg Old Palace from October 12 to 13, 2023. The conference was organized by the research network project “European Times” (EUTIM), the Aleksander Brückner Center for Polish Studies, and the Network for Ukrainian Studies.
By Friederike Pannewick. This essay focuses on a Syrian author who spent most of the 1980s in self-imposed silence: the dramatist Saadallah Wannous (1941-1997). This internationally acclaimed author belonged to a generation of Arab intellectuals and artists whose artistic self-understanding was strongly molded by the Palestine conflict. Deeply concerned about the political consequences of the Israel-Egypt unilateral peace treaty on Palestinians, Wannous stopped writing literature for a whole decade after Egyptian president Sadat’s visit to Israel in fall 1977.
By Idriss Jebari. In their hearts, historians are first storytellers who seek to offer intelligible narratives of the past. Ever since Hayden White’s Metahistory, the border between history and literature has become less meaningful. Yet, valid questions remain: can a passage from a novel be used with the same factual authority as, say, a newspaper clipping, a police report, or a population register? What about a personal diary or a set of exchanged letters?
This blogpost is the second part of a summary of the contributions to the EUTIM conference “Time Out of Joint: Literary (Re)Visions of Time in Eastern and Central Europe”. At the centre of the event were were narratives of time and conceptualizations of history in Central and Eastern European poetry, novels, film, and drama.
At the centre of the EUTIM conference “Time Out of Joint: Literary (Re)Visions of Time in Eastern and Central Europe”, were narratives of time and conceptualizations of history in Central and Eastern European poetry, novels, film, and drama. The event featured some of the leading scholars of Belarusian, Crimean Tatar, Czech, Polish and Ukrainian literatures. This contribution is the first part of a dossier with the paper abstracts.
From the 15th to the 17th of September 2022, the second EUTIM Annual Conference, “Time Out of Joint: Literary (Re)Visions of Time in Eastern and Central Europe”, will take place at Potsdam University as a hybrid event. We spoke to the conveners, Bohdan Tokarskyi and Alexander Wöll, to learn more about the conference and how it connects to current political and cultural developments.
By Simla Dogangun. There has been a drastic change in the traditional conception of world literature in the last two decades: from a space that consists of canonical, high-cultural texts which have traditionally acted as arbiters of literary value, it has transformed into a capitalist-driven nebulous field in which literary works circulate in the same manner as goods do.
