Stanford Humanities Center
Comparing Literatures: Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, Turkish, Urdu
Comparative Literature has spent the last few decades expanding its focus beyond Europe and the Anglophone Americas. But has it succeeded? Departments around the world include scholars working on Hebrew, Persian, Arabic, and to a lesser extent Turkish, Urdu, and other non-European languages. But the desire for coverage remains a chimera, always tempting with the prospect of inclusion: "if only we had somebody who did…" What would success, even if we subscribed to such teleology, look like?
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The eight essays that appear in the Theories and Methodologies section of the January 2024 issue of PMLA examine core concepts derived from the premodern compendium of Arabic thought—associated with the disciplines of aesthetics, jurisprudence, philosophy, rhetoric, theology, and more—and activate them as nodes of theoretical contemplation.
The primary aim of this Theories and Methodologies special feature (PMLA, March 2024) is to spotlight work on 'the Persianate' in the disciplines of language and literature. The essayists examine the aesthetic, cultural, linguistic, political, religious, economic, and social currents that both construct the Persianate world and compromise it at key moments not just in history but also in certain analytic contexts.
Ma'na is not the same as “meaning” at all; it is its own story.
At this point in history, a focus on literature as an object of study is informed by administrative and pedagogical necessities.
Saqer Almarri explores the terms khuntha, mukhannath, and khanith, and their associated identities, along with their linguistic characteristics and literary uses.*
Mixed forms are crucial not only to the understanding of khuntha, mukhannath, and khanith communities, but also to the very scaffolding of Almarri’s paper.
This essay examines an instance of media activism by members of a Karachi-based organization run by and for nonnormatively gendered people who are known as khwaja siras.
The Untranslatable refers to how concepts assimilate actually existing ways of speaking and being and how ways of speaking and being interfere with concepts.
Amichai’s poetry articulates an implicit theory of translation as the intertextual practice of a historical agent, an implicit theory that is poised to provide a new perspective on the critical discourse of contemporary translation studies.
Wittgenstein’s theory of language provides a good methodology for making sense of maʿna in Classical Arabic.
Driven by his artistic sensibility, the poet might tear up a given rule, not to do harm to language, but to urge it forward. The poet or man of letters, then, is the one in whose hands language develops.
Elizabeth Bernhardt and Alexander Key talk about the future not of language teaching, but of language learning.
Is methodological rigor all that is necessary to establish a humanities curriculum, or do humanists have a duty to center moral principles in our pedagogy? How might we bridge the two extremes of delineating humanities departments in American universities—rigidly bordered individual fields versus large umbrella programs like the Global Humanities? What could exist between the scales of the local and the global?
What is the point of the humanities right now? Do they help us save the world? Become a better person? Develop empathy? Which line of reasoning do we use to justify our own existence to administrators, to students, to donors? This question and its subsidiaries form the center not only within our own discussions at HumCore, but of the larger discussion about core humanities curriculum design in the United States.
How might one design or adapt a course to make it more responsibly global? How might we teach important texts, long disappeared into the morass of the “canon,” in such a way that highlights their inherent globality and renders them new?
Though many of us are frequently concerned with what we’re currently teaching and why, and though we might have strong opinions about what ought to be taught in the coming years, fewer of us have a comprehensive understanding of how the past century of institutional approaches to curriculum design has contributed to our present circumstances.
While Hans Robert Jauss writes that “things which occur at the same time are not really simultaneous,” this essay argues for the simultaneity of things that occur at different times. In fact, it proposes multiple simultaneous temporalities as a constitutive feature of global modernism.
In this ACLA State of the Discipline Report, Alexander Key writes, "Being an Arabist elicits warm acceptance in Comparative Literature in 2015, but Arabists are still in no position to advocate for the inclusion of Arabic thinkers on our departments’ theory reading lists. Why?"
